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What gets us about the films that are made from our favourite video games isn’t that they’re almost inevitably bad, but how bad they inevitably are. There’s no good reason they should be.

Every other movie Hollywood produces is based on a book. The equally maligned comic book conversions have at least seen some notable highs with the likes of Superman, Spider-man and, of course, The Dark Knight. Plays, TV shows, and other movies have been huge box office success.

Yet games are trapped in the basement, with the mere mention of their titles putting the audience in mind of Pacman, Doom, and greasy nerds fondling themselves to naked Lara Croft fanart. It’s not fair. It’s not right.

The trouble is, with the kind of movies we usually have fighting our corner, it’s really not surprising. Part of the problem is that the people who greenlight movies haven’t historically been gamers themselves.

This is slowly changing as the gaming industry expands, a new generation moves through the ranks, and movie executives realise just how much money a big AAA release like Grand Theft Auto 4 actually pulls in. But not quickly enough.

Rubbish plots

Prior to the 90s, any form of gaming that made the jump to the movies was all but guaranteed a sinister portrayal, whether it was blowing up the world in Wargames (1983), confusing the hell out of people with something like Tron (1982) or suggesting that roleplaying games would kill you, as in Mazes and Monsters (also 1982).

In fairness, at the time, very few games of this era lended themselves to gripping entertainment. Their plots were generally simple, graphics even more so, and the games that people could be relied on to actually know were almost all of the Space Invaders/Missile Command variety.

Not to be disheartened, Ruby-Spears tried bringing a few of these to life for the short-lived Saturday Supercade (1983). If you want a picture of desperation, imagine sitting in a room with orders to build a weekly show around cartoon shorts starring Donkey Kong, Frogger (now an investigative reporter, if you can believe it), Q-Bert and Donkey Kong Jr.

The same company later produced Pac-Man, Rubik The Amazing Cube, Mega Man and Dragon’s Lair, carving out a real niche for itself that we in the UK were mostly fortunate enough to miss.

Think we’re lying? Search for the clips on YouTube.

By the start of the 1990s, both Hollywood and Japan started getting more ambitious. 1993 saw the infamous Super Mario Bros movie, described by star Bob Hoskins as “The worst thing I ever did”, in which the day-glo world of the Mushroom Kingdom became a terrifying, fungus-ridden Blade Runner rip-off.

Turning Frogger into a journalist suddenly seems like such a small leap, doesn’t it? This was followed by the truly ghastly Street Fighter II movie, which featured roughly five million characters, two braincells, and exactly one good line (”For you, the day Bison graced your village was the most important day of your life. But for me… it was Tuesday”) and the two Mortal Kombat movies – the first of which was decent, given the limitations of the source, and especially compared to the two hours of agonising genital pain that would be preferable to its sequel.

We’re skipping a few here, including the first two Pokemon movies, Fatal Fury, and the Japanese version of Super Mario Bros, “The Great Quest To Rescue Princess Peach”. However, rest assured, you’re not missing much if you haven’t seen them.

The only game conversions of this era to hold any fans at all are the original Street Fighter anime, the largely horrific Super Mario Bros/Legend of Zelda cartoons, glorified Nintendo advert Captain N: The Game Master, and the genuinely brilliant Earthworm Jim, which still holds up surprisingly well compared to other contemporary shows in the same vein, such as The Tick and Sam and Max.

As far as the PC was concerned, the transition from games to movies typically went the other way during the 1990s. The birth of interactive movies gave companies the chance to be film producers without going to Hollywood, and while many titles were rumoured to be considering making the jump to movie stardom – including Doom (long before the film we finally got), Monkey Island, and Deus Ex – for the most part it just didn’t happen.

The two oddest projects that actually did go ahead were the very cheap kids’ gameshows based on Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego? (the first of which features the most horrifically memorable acapella track in the history of catchy songs), and a Canadian sitcom based on the classic Lucasarts adventure Maniac Mansion.

Attack of the PC

Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001) typically gets the credit for being the first blockbuster based on a PC game, and rightly so. It wasn’t actually the first – Wing Commander came out in 1999 – but it was easily the first big success, and one of the only conversions up to this point that bothered treating its source material with some respect.

Yes, it’s far from perfect, and as soon as Angelina Jolie first dons her padded bra to fight a killer robot, it’s clear that it’s trying far, far too hard to be ‘extreme’… but it’s not a bad movie. It’s fun, competently made, with a decent budget, and generally good additions, such as adding an extra emotional level involving Lara’s relationship with her dead father.

It’s also notable that when Toby Gard and Crystal Dynamics rebooted the franchise with Legend, they made many similar decisions – losing the new Mission Control character Bryce, but adding Zip and Alistair as tech/historical replacements, and putting much more narrative emphasis on Lara’s parents, and why she feels so compelled to run around arctic tundra in that infamous green T-shirt and short-shorts.

Despite the Croft movie setting the pace for the rest of the industry, and being very successful in the process (it pulled in over $270 million), its lessons were almost instantly forgotten. In the 16 years since it came out, only Silent Hill (2006) stands out as a genuine attempt to make the most of its source material. It’s not a great movie, but at least it feels right.

Throwaway story

In fairness to the rest of the industry, Tomb Raider had a relatively easy conversion process. The original game was little more than an interactive Indiana Jones with a female lead, and if you can’t sell Angelina Jolie bouncing round with twin-pistols blazing, there’s not much hope.

True, the much weaker sequel underperformed, but largely because by that point everyone was sick to death of Lara, and even the hardcore fans were still licking their wounds after The Angel of Darkness. None of this changes that the films that followed typically felt as embarrassed by what they were doing as their audiences felt after paying to see them.

The average movie took the game’s title, the character’s names and as little else as possible. Doom no longer featured the legions of Hell, but some pseudo-science nonsense about chromosomes turning people into mutated killers.

Alone in the Dark featured its protagonist mostly in well-lit environments, backed up by marines.

Probably the most bizarre, not filmed by a certain German we’ll get to in just a moment, is Hitman. In the original games, Agent 47 is a genetically engineered killer with a barcode on the back of his bald head, working freelance for a group called The Agency.

When the trailers came out for his cinema debut, they proudly announced that instead, he was a weapon bred by the Church to rid the world of evil. Both plots are hurriedly dropped before the end of the opening credits, which supposedly show 47’s training, but are mostly just footage from the TV show Dark Angel with Ave Maria played over the top.

The join is particularly obvious in one scene in which a classroom of ‘Hitmen’ in training are shown with their barcode tattoos on their necks, not the backs of their heads. The only thing more noticeable than what gets left out of the movies is what gets left in.

For some reason, the creators will happily throw out everything that made a franchise popular, but then panic about the audience’s reaction over something insanely trivial. Costume, for instance.

Street Fighter may have turned Ryu and Ken from world-class martial artists into incompetent con artists so that the all-American Guile could be the hero of the story, but at least it thought up a way to get them into their iconic outfits, and make Kylie Minogue do Cammy’s bum-waving victory pose!

Conversion problems

The more seriously a movie appears to take the source, the more problematic the shoehorned game elements become. Characters don’t need to scream things like “Game Over!” to remind us what we’re watching, any more than Voldemort should stop in the middle of a speech in one of the Harry Potter movies to wink at the camera and whisper “Page 231″ or “Oooh, papercut!”

Hitman is one of the most problematic examples, simply because the game elements are so screamingly incompatible with everything the film wants us to believe. Don’t get us wrong, the story is dumb enough on its own. Incredibly dumb.

It’s a movie where Interpol agents actually think they have jurisdiction over local police forces, whose plot revolves around 47 going on the run from a baddie who wants to silence the ‘only’ witness to the most public assassination since Dallas.

However, despite all this, it wants to be taken seriously. It wants some emotional resonance. It wants to be, if not believable, to offer the all-important suspension of disbelief. But there’s a catch. Films and games play on different expectations, especially when it comes to breaks from reality, and the broader strokes that developers use to build and reinforce things like character identity and our immersion into the world.

Even the best games still feel like fully artificial constructs, which makes it easier for the magic Rule of Cool to paper over the cracks. In a film, everything from costume to weapon choice can quickly look dumb when we see it from a different perspective, and the more realistic the setting, the more jarring it is.

Hitman’s already hysterical line: “He works for a group known only as The Organisation, so secret no-one knows it exists…” utterly implodes when you notice that all 47’s kit is branded with said Organisation’s logo.

Likewise, while we’re used to characters having limited wardrobes in games, there’s no excuse for the film 47 fleeing after his cover is blown by his own agency, only to pop into a shop and buy himself a brand new suit and bright red tie, just like the ones he wears every day of his working life.

Raging boll

We’ve put this off long enough. Most movies based on PC games come from one man, and you know who we mean. The most notable thing about German director Uwe Boll is that somehow, he’s able to keep making movies. People let him put his sticky paws on their licenses, presumably for a quick buck they wouldn’t otherwise have gotten, and without exception, they’re awful.

The full line-up so far consists House of the Dead, Alone in the Dark, Bloodrayne, Bloodrayne 2, In The Name Of The King: A Dungeon Siege Tale, and Postal. The next, and currently last on the slate, is Far Cry.

For financial reasons, this is likely the last of them for now, with Boll currently raising money for one of his original movies. Two films he expressed an interest in that we were thankfully spared were World of Warcraft (Blizzard famously responded with “We will not sell the movie rights, not to you, especially not to you”) and Metal Gear Solid, where Kojima himself went on the record to say: “It’s impossible that we’d ever do a movie with him.”

Terrible as his game films are, they’ve done well for their investors. The early ones were boosted by a German tax break that let him field a decent budget, and there’s no doubting his knack of getting surprisingly major names involved.

Just consider this: Bloodrayne has Ben Kingsley as the villain. We’ll repeat that. Uwe Boll got Gandhi to play the vampire king in his schlocky horror film. That deserves some respect, ideally served up in the form of a one-way ticket to, say, Mars.

It’s also worth pointing out that the man does deserve some modicum of sympathy, with most of the people lining up to castigate him for his movies never actually having seen any of them. Phrases like “Worst Director Ever” are thrown around like cynical wedding confetti, and at that, we have to disagree.

We’ve seen all of his videogame movies, and while they’re bad, they’re not that bad. Yes, Boll is the man who thought that the song ‘7 Seconds’ made the ideal background music for Alone in the Dark’s sex scene, while, apparently, oblivious to the schoolboy sniggering over the hero’s performance, and the fact that it’s a song about racism.

Even so, compare his work to most of the late night sci-fi movies, B-movie directors like Coleman Francis, or the truly agonising Whatever Movie films shoved down our throats by Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, and it’s painfully clear: Boll isn’t even close to the bottom of the barrel. It just happens to be a very deep barrel, that’s all.

What really jumps out about Boll’s game movies has nothing to do with any specific part of production, such as, say, bland scripts or bizarre cinematography – although both are definitely troubled.

Dungeon Siege goes out of the window in the first minute, when without any sense of irony, the villain and the female lead he’s manipulating are shown lying on top of a bed sharing the following unfortunate dialogue: “I knew you’d come.” “I told you I would.” Instead, the real challenge is trying to work out how he got from the game, to the movie he ended up making.

Take the Bloodrayne movie. You’d never get a ‘good’ movie out of a large breasted vampire chick in leathers slurping her way through a whole battalion of Nazi necks, but you could get a fun, shamelessly trashy flick out of it. Boll decided to make a moody, sloth-paced period piece instead.

The direct-to-DVD sequel? A western. Seriously. In which Billy the Kid is a vampire, Rayne is useless, and time loses all meaning until the credits. Bet you can’t wait.

The future imperfect

If there’s one good thing about videogame movies’ legendary awfulness, it’s that the bigger companies are finally starting to be slightly cannier about the games they convert. The Prince of Persia movie, starring Jake Gyllenhaal, is a proper Hollywood production, while Bioshock is being headed by Gore Verbinski – hopefully the one who directed the fantastic Pirates of the Caribbean movie, rather than its two horrific sequels.

Blizzard’s plans for a liveaction World of Warcraft have gone quiet, but we’re confident that if it ever happens, it’ll be something to see.

Overall, things finally seem to be improving. If just one of these high profile movies can blow away the box office, just maybe videogame movies will start getting the care and respect they so badly deserve. If not, just let us know when the Tetris movie comes out. We have high hopes for that one.

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First published in PC Format Issue 226

Are we addicted to graphics power? Are Nvidia and AMD, in reality, the pushers of the most addictive shader skag?

In any other walk of life you’d be dragged off to rehab for this intensely self-destructive cycle of substance abuse. But just like that heroin addict, who’s currently trying to break into your home and steal your pride and joy gaming system, the PC industry is addicted to graphics.

It’s the driving force behind the games we love and the reason we love the PC so much in the first place and why consoles will always be toys in comparison. Of course, we could turn around, throw our hands heavenwards and shout ‘Enough is enough, this madness must end! Stop the development! My graphics card is good enough.’ But where would that get us? We’d still be playing Tomb Raider on an original 3dfx Voodoo card.

The desperate truth is we need, we long for that hit of hardcore 3D acceleration. We need help, we need treatment, what we need is the latest graphics card. Sliding that long card into a tight PCI Express slot always feels so good.

For many years now we’ve been happy in this abusive relationship. Clinging to our ageing card, trying to scrap the last remnants of a decent frame rate together by installing hacked drivers and dropping the resolution, until we end up crawling back to our favourite green or red dealer for a fresh hit of delicious 3D.

But today that magic hit isn’t just about graphics: from HD decoding and physics acceleration to GP-GPU features, that graphics card is offering a lot of technology. The next generation of cards is set to up this technology to a new level and with the advent of a new pusher on the scene – in the form of chip-giant Intel – the entire graphics market is set for an enormous shake up.

It’ll be a combination of new competition, changing demands and the evolving technology that is bringing general processing and graphics processing closer and closer together. But what will happen when these two worlds collide? Lets find out…

Back in time

Not that we want to dwell on the past but how did this addictive relationship start? The answer lies with what PCs were back in the early nineties and how 3D images are generated in the first place. So lets take you back, back, back in time to when the original Doom, Duke Nuke ‘em 3D and Wing Commander adorned our screens.

3D gaming was a simplistic affair – sometimes referred to as ‘vector games’. 3D line objects were made of vectors; a mathematical construct and nothing more than a line in space defined by two points. Put three vectors together and you get a triangle, put enough triangles together and you can form anything.

• 12 reasons PC gaming is better than consoles

Luckily for your average 7MHz, 16-bit processor, vectors can be manipulated using simple matrices functions, so they can be scaled and rotated in our imaginary space before being drawn to the screen. But lines aren’t very exciting, unless they’re white and Bolivian in origin.

As a stepping stone to true 3D, Doom and its clones were based on 2D maps that had simple height information and the actual 3D effect were a textured wall projection. Similarly, the monsters were flat bitmaps positioned on that same 2D map, scaled according to their distance from the player.

NOT SO ELITE: Graphics have come a long way since the dark days of 1982

This combined with pseudo lighting effects enabled id Software to generate a basic, fully textured 3D world on a lowly 386 PC. Faster processors have enabled devs to combine the texture handling used in Doom with a true full 3D Vector Engine to create the likes of Descent in 1995, and in 1996, the seminal Quake.

But despite all the cleverness of these engines, incredibly basic abilities, such as texture filtering were and remain simply too processor intensive for a standard CPU to even consider attempting in real time.

Acceleration heaven

The first time our gelatinous eyeballs gazed upon the smooth textures and lighting effects in Quake or the explosive effects of Incoming, we were hooked. It was these types of effects and abilities that enabled a mid-nineties PC to pull off arcade-level graphics.

While not wanting to delve into degree level subjects, to really understand why graphics cards exist as they do today, it’s helpful to know what’s required to create that eye-pleasing 3D display we so enjoy. As you’ll see graphics cards started with handling only a fraction of the total process, up until today where they embrace almost the entire task.

We’ve already mentioned vectors and how they can be used to build up models from triangular meshes. You start here with your models, these need to be transformed and scaled to fit into a virtual ‘world view’, the application then applies a ‘view space’, which is how the player will view this world. It’s a pyramid volume cut out of the world space and bounds the only area of interest to the renderer.

From this pyramid we get the clipping space, which is the visible square of our virtual viewport and finally these are translated into the screen space where the 2D x/y coordinates are calculated ready for the pixel rendering. These steps are important as originally this was done on the CPU, but stages were slowly shifted to the GPU. So are you still with us?

As that’s the simple part, each of those ‘views’ is required for different stages in rendering. For instance, to help optimise the rendering it makes sense to discard all the undrawn triangles. Occlusion culling will remove obscured objects, trivial clipping removes objects outside the ‘view space’ and finally culling determines which triangles are facing away from the viewer and so can be ignored.

The clipping space view is created from this remaining world space and any models that bisect the viewing boundary box need to be clipped off and retessellated, leaving only the visible triangles in the final scene.

Light and bright

With an optimised view space created, lighting can be applied. It’s important to understand this isn’t the visual representation of light, it’s calculating how ‘bright’ every surface is going to be. A scene can have a global light-source, along with point-sources and spotlight sources.

Every triangle surface will have material properties, such as ambient, diffuse, specular and emissive material colours. For every source and every triangle a calculation will be made to determine its total luminosity. As you can imagine the more sources there are, the larger the calculation expense.

It’s important to remember that, at this stage, all we know is the luminance for each triangular surface, the actual rendering comes later..

For now lets just say each pixel can now be blended with its corresponding lighting values, textures and other effects, such as bump maps and light maps. On top of this each pixel will have filtering applied, fogging, shadow values and even antialiasing to produce the final image.

If you’re feeling a bit dazed and wondering what that’s useful for, it’s so you have an overview of what goes into creating a single 3D frame, which is on screen for mere milliseconds. As graphics cards have developed more of that pipeline has been moved or added to the graphics card.

With the original 3D cards, only the end rasterisation and rendering stages were performed on-card and that was by dumb, fixed-units that could only perform a single render pass. Multitexturing and multi-pass rendering improved visual quality and when DirectX 7.0 was released in 1999, graphics cards got a little smarter because of Transform and Lighting (T&L).

T&L moved the lighting and vertex transformation stages on to the graphics card and was the first move away from CPU-based vertex handling. It wasn’t until the introduction of DirectX 8 that things really got interesting, as the first shaders appeared.

Vertex shaders enable programmers to manipulate vertices directly on the card, while pixel shaders replaced the fixed multi-texture engines with programmable ones. These gave graphics cards their first smarts, even though these were limited; there couldn’t be any branches in the code, there were limits on the number of commands and variables, plus the total program length was very short.

So while technically these cards were running programs of a sort, the two types of shader units were different in design and very limited.

The smart stuff

It took until DirectX 9.0c was released in 2004 with Shader Model 3.0 that cards started to look more like a collection of smart processors than dumb fixed logic. Dynamic branching, program lengths over 512 commands and access to hundreds of registers made graphics cards sound more like mini-super computers.

The final evolution came with unified shaders introduced in DirectX 10 and Shader Model 4.0. At this point there’s no distinction between vertex or pixel shaders. Cards have ‘unified’ shaders, akin to having hundreds of tiny dedicated processing units and are found on both the GeForce 8 and Radeon HD 2000, and later generations of cards.

This has enabled both AMD and Nvidia to start offering GP-GPU features and programming languages for current graphics cards and which allow them to process physics and other mathematically complex data alongside 3D rendering.

Larry who?

As testament to the idea that shaders are becoming processors in their own right, Intel is wading into the graphics arena and the ripples could permanently erode the market that once seemed so rock solid.

As we already know the new GPU is codenamed Larrabee and its heart is based, in part, on the original x86 Pentium core. Intel is on record as saying it can, in theory, run OS kernel level code. The idea is to take a bunch of optimised, in-order x86 Pentium cores, add in a Vector Processing Unit and tie the whole thing together via each core’s L2 cache using a high-speed ring bus.

Alongside the multi-core design there’s a dedicated texture filtering unit, plus the usual extra gubbins for the memory controller, display and system interfaces. Intel is approaching the problem in the opposite direction to AMD and Nvidia. It’s almost dumbing-down an x86 core to help fit as many as possible onto a GPU die.

All parties are selling these as more than just a graphics solution. Intel is partnering with Dreamworks, who will be using Larrabee as an accelerated computing platform for ray tracing frames within its animated features. With Intel measuring a 1GHz, 24-core Larrabee GPU running almost five times faster than an eight-core Xeon processor at 2.6GHz at ray tracing. This shows the huge acceleration potential GP-GPU solutions have in the real world.

Currently no one has any idea how well Larrabee will perform, if it performs at all. However, we managed to dig out some figures from a paper Intel published. It estimates the performance of a Larrabee processor running F.E.A.R., Gears of War and Half-Life 2: Episode 2. The most interesting section took the DirectX commands generated from a sequence of random frames from each of these games.

These commands were fed through a ‘functional model’ of Larrabee rendering at 1,600×1,200 with 4x AA. The test was to see how many 1GHz cores were required to keep a constant 60fps output for each game. The answers is between 10 and 24 cores depending on the game.

Clearly this is nowhere near the performance of top-end cards, the frames would have to be nearer 180fps at that resolution, but even so at 3GHz with 24 cores that would be achievable and still in the realms of reality.

When Larry comes

By the time Larrabee launches, it could be almost 2010 and both Nvidia and AMD will have had next-gen DirectX 11 devices well out of the stable. Intel’s own figures show that its core scaling works well up to and over 48 cores with apparently only a two to ten per cent drop in performance.

It’s impossible at this stage to know how much a Larrabee card will cost, but we can make several massive assumptions based on existing technology.

For example, a 24-core GPU would require 6MB of L2 cache, that’s roughly 300 million transistors. Lets guesstimate that the x86 modified Pentium cores are twice their original sizes at 6 million transistors, that’s around 450 million transistors in total for a 24-core Larrabee GPU.

Now, if you accept those transistor counts and accept fab costs are closer to that of a full processor than a GPU, at roughly half the transistor count of a 3GHz Core i7, the consumer price could be up to £230. That’s not including the 1GB of GDDR5, of course.

The issue is whether Intel can put out a GPU that’s affordable and a good performer, when the Larrabee’s launched. At least AMD and Nvidia will put us out of our misery soon enough, as they’re both expected to field hardware supporting DirectX 11 in the second half of 2009.

It will be interesting to see, which of the two has the most powerful GP-GPU solution, but regardless Intel won’t get an easy ride. The quality of Intel’s drivers is going to be a key issue and support for dual-GPU or SLI-style, dual-card support may be a necessity, if it wants to compete for the performance crown.

——————————————————————————————————-

First published in PC Format Issue 226

Are we addicted to graphics power? Are Nvidia and AMD, in reality, the pushers of the most addictive shader skag?

In any other walk of life you’d be dragged off to rehab for this intensely self-destructive cycle of substance abuse. But just like that heroin addict, who’s currently trying to break into your home and steal your pride and joy gaming system, the PC industry is addicted to graphics.

It’s the driving force behind the games we love and the reason we love the PC so much in the first place and why consoles will always be toys in comparison. Of course, we could turn around, throw our hands heavenwards and shout ‘Enough is enough, this madness must end! Stop the development! My graphics card is good enough.’ But where would that get us? We’d still be playing Tomb Raider on an original 3dfx Voodoo card.

The desperate truth is we need, we long for that hit of hardcore 3D acceleration. We need help, we need treatment, what we need is the latest graphics card. Sliding that long card into a tight PCI Express slot always feels so good.

For many years now we’ve been happy in this abusive relationship. Clinging to our ageing card, trying to scrap the last remnants of a decent frame rate together by installing hacked drivers and dropping the resolution, until we end up crawling back to our favourite green or red dealer for a fresh hit of delicious 3D.

But today that magic hit isn’t just about graphics: from HD decoding and physics acceleration to GP-GPU features, that graphics card is offering a lot of technology. The next generation of cards is set to up this technology to a new level and with the advent of a new pusher on the scene – in the form of chip-giant Intel – the entire graphics market is set for an enormous shake up.

It’ll be a combination of new competition, changing demands and the evolving technology that is bringing general processing and graphics processing closer and closer together. But what will happen when these two worlds collide? Lets find out…

Back in time

Not that we want to dwell on the past but how did this addictive relationship start? The answer lies with what PCs were back in the early nineties and how 3D images are generated in the first place. So lets take you back, back, back in time to when the original Doom, Duke Nuke ‘em 3D and Wing Commander adorned our screens.

3D gaming was a simplistic affair – sometimes referred to as ‘vector games’. 3D line objects were made of vectors; a mathematical construct and nothing more than a line in space defined by two points. Put three vectors together and you get a triangle, put enough triangles together and you can form anything.

• 12 reasons PC gaming is better than consoles

Luckily for your average 7MHz, 16-bit processor, vectors can be manipulated using simple matrices functions, so they can be scaled and rotated in our imaginary space before being drawn to the screen. But lines aren’t very exciting, unless they’re white and Bolivian in origin.

As a stepping stone to true 3D, Doom and its clones were based on 2D maps that had simple height information and the actual 3D effect were a textured wall projection. Similarly, the monsters were flat bitmaps positioned on that same 2D map, scaled according to their distance from the player.

NOT SO ELITE: Graphics have come a long way since the dark days of 1982

This combined with pseudo lighting effects enabled id Software to generate a basic, fully textured 3D world on a lowly 386 PC. Faster processors have enabled devs to combine the texture handling used in Doom with a true full 3D Vector Engine to create the likes of Descent in 1995, and in 1996, the seminal Quake.

But despite all the cleverness of these engines, incredibly basic abilities, such as texture filtering were and remain simply too processor intensive for a standard CPU to even consider attempting in real time.

Acceleration heaven

The first time our gelatinous eyeballs gazed upon the smooth textures and lighting effects in Quake or the explosive effects of Incoming, we were hooked. It was these types of effects and abilities that enabled a mid-nineties PC to pull off arcade-level graphics.

While not wanting to delve into degree level subjects, to really understand why graphics cards exist as they do today, it’s helpful to know what’s required to create that eye-pleasing 3D display we so enjoy. As you’ll see graphics cards started with handling only a fraction of the total process, up until today where they embrace almost the entire task.

We’ve already mentioned vectors and how they can be used to build up models from triangular meshes. You start here with your models, these need to be transformed and scaled to fit into a virtual ‘world view’, the application then applies a ‘view space’, which is how the player will view this world. It’s a pyramid volume cut out of the world space and bounds the only area of interest to the renderer.

From this pyramid we get the clipping space, which is the visible square of our virtual viewport and finally these are translated into the screen space where the 2D x/y coordinates are calculated ready for the pixel rendering. These steps are important as originally this was done on the CPU, but stages were slowly shifted to the GPU. So are you still with us?

As that’s the simple part, each of those ‘views’ is required for different stages in rendering. For instance, to help optimise the rendering it makes sense to discard all the undrawn triangles. Occlusion culling will remove obscured objects, trivial clipping removes objects outside the ‘view space’ and finally culling determines which triangles are facing away from the viewer and so can be ignored.

The clipping space view is created from this remaining world space and any models that bisect the viewing boundary box need to be clipped off and retessellated, leaving only the visible triangles in the final scene.

Light and bright

With an optimised view space created, lighting can be applied. It’s important to understand this isn’t the visual representation of light, it’s calculating how ‘bright’ every surface is going to be. A scene can have a global light-source, along with point-sources and spotlight sources.

Every triangle surface will have material properties, such as ambient, diffuse, specular and emissive material colours. For every source and every triangle a calculation will be made to determine its total luminosity. As you can imagine the more sources there are, the larger the calculation expense.

It’s important to remember that, at this stage, all we know is the luminance for each triangular surface, the actual rendering comes later..

For now lets just say each pixel can now be blended with its corresponding lighting values, textures and other effects, such as bump maps and light maps. On top of this each pixel will have filtering applied, fogging, shadow values and even antialiasing to produce the final image.

If you’re feeling a bit dazed and wondering what that’s useful for, it’s so you have an overview of what goes into creating a single 3D frame, which is on screen for mere milliseconds. As graphics cards have developed more of that pipeline has been moved or added to the graphics card.

With the original 3D cards, only the end rasterisation and rendering stages were performed on-card and that was by dumb, fixed-units that could only perform a single render pass. Multitexturing and multi-pass rendering improved visual quality and when DirectX 7.0 was released in 1999, graphics cards got a little smarter because of Transform and Lighting (T&L).

T&L moved the lighting and vertex transformation stages on to the graphics card and was the first move away from CPU-based vertex handling. It wasn’t until the introduction of DirectX 8 that things really got interesting, as the first shaders appeared.

Vertex shaders enable programmers to manipulate vertices directly on the card, while pixel shaders replaced the fixed multi-texture engines with programmable ones. These gave graphics cards their first smarts, even though these were limited; there couldn’t be any branches in the code, there were limits on the number of commands and variables, plus the total program length was very short.

So while technically these cards were running programs of a sort, the two types of shader units were different in design and very limited.

The smart stuff

It took until DirectX 9.0c was released in 2004 with Shader Model 3.0 that cards started to look more like a collection of smart processors than dumb fixed logic. Dynamic branching, program lengths over 512 commands and access to hundreds of registers made graphics cards sound more like mini-super computers.

The final evolution came with unified shaders introduced in DirectX 10 and Shader Model 4.0. At this point there’s no distinction between vertex or pixel shaders. Cards have ‘unified’ shaders, akin to having hundreds of tiny dedicated processing units and are found on both the GeForce 8 and Radeon HD 2000, and later generations of cards.

This has enabled both AMD and Nvidia to start offering GP-GPU features and programming languages for current graphics cards and which allow them to process physics and other mathematically complex data alongside 3D rendering.

Larry who?

As testament to the idea that shaders are becoming processors in their own right, Intel is wading into the graphics arena and the ripples could permanently erode the market that once seemed so rock solid.

As we already know the new GPU is codenamed Larrabee and its heart is based, in part, on the original x86 Pentium core. Intel is on record as saying it can, in theory, run OS kernel level code. The idea is to take a bunch of optimised, in-order x86 Pentium cores, add in a Vector Processing Unit and tie the whole thing together via each core’s L2 cache using a high-speed ring bus.

Alongside the multi-core design there’s a dedicated texture filtering unit, plus the usual extra gubbins for the memory controller, display and system interfaces. Intel is approaching the problem in the opposite direction to AMD and Nvidia. It’s almost dumbing-down an x86 core to help fit as many as possible onto a GPU die.

All parties are selling these as more than just a graphics solution. Intel is partnering with Dreamworks, who will be using Larrabee as an accelerated computing platform for ray tracing frames within its animated features. With Intel measuring a 1GHz, 24-core Larrabee GPU running almost five times faster than an eight-core Xeon processor at 2.6GHz at ray tracing. This shows the huge acceleration potential GP-GPU solutions have in the real world.

Currently no one has any idea how well Larrabee will perform, if it performs at all. However, we managed to dig out some figures from a paper Intel published. It estimates the performance of a Larrabee processor running F.E.A.R., Gears of War and Half-Life 2: Episode 2. The most interesting section took the DirectX commands generated from a sequence of random frames from each of these games.

These commands were fed through a ‘functional model’ of Larrabee rendering at 1,600×1,200 with 4x AA. The test was to see how many 1GHz cores were required to keep a constant 60fps output for each game. The answers is between 10 and 24 cores depending on the game.

Clearly this is nowhere near the performance of top-end cards, the frames would have to be nearer 180fps at that resolution, but even so at 3GHz with 24 cores that would be achievable and still in the realms of reality.

When Larry comes

By the time Larrabee launches, it could be almost 2010 and both Nvidia and AMD will have had next-gen DirectX 11 devices well out of the stable. Intel’s own figures show that its core scaling works well up to and over 48 cores with apparently only a two to ten per cent drop in performance.

It’s impossible at this stage to know how much a Larrabee card will cost, but we can make several massive assumptions based on existing technology.

For example, a 24-core GPU would require 6MB of L2 cache, that’s roughly 300 million transistors. Lets guesstimate that the x86 modified Pentium cores are twice their original sizes at 6 million transistors, that’s around 450 million transistors in total for a 24-core Larrabee GPU.

Now, if you accept those transistor counts and accept fab costs are closer to that of a full processor than a GPU, at roughly half the transistor count of a 3GHz Core i7, the consumer price could be up to £230. That’s not including the 1GB of GDDR5, of course.

The issue is whether Intel can put out a GPU that’s affordable and a good performer, when the Larrabee’s launched. At least AMD and Nvidia will put us out of our misery soon enough, as they’re both expected to field hardware supporting DirectX 11 in the second half of 2009.

It will be interesting to see, which of the two has the most powerful GP-GPU solution, but regardless Intel won’t get an easy ride. The quality of Intel’s drivers is going to be a key issue and support for dual-GPU or SLI-style, dual-card support may be a necessity, if it wants to compete for the performance crown.

——————————————————————————————————-

First published in PC Format Issue 226

Although the eMachines brand may not be as well known as others, its eMachines E520- 571G16Mi is a sturdy choice that provides great mobility. Unfortunately, performance is limited and restricts it to basic home use.

As with most laptops, the 2.6kg chassis is light enough for short-term travel use, but won’t suit longer journeys. Its 206-minute battery life is excellent, however.

Tough build

The plain design won’t win any awards, but its resilience makes it one of the tougher laptops here. The plastics used are hard-wearing and regular travellers are sure to appreciate its strength. The dark-grey colouring also means that dirt and smudges are slow to appear.

Unfortunately, this level of quality doesn’t carry across to the user interface. The keyboard is large and suitably responsive, although it flexes a great deal when typing. The keys also respond with a noisy clicking sound, so speed-typists are sure to be quickly frustrated.

The 15.4-inch Super-TFT screen compensates somewhat. Its sharpness and vibrant colour reproduction are great for watching movies and basic photo editing. We found blacks to be slightly washed out, however.

Where the eMachines falls short is in its limited performance. As with the Advent 5712, its single-core Intel Celeron processor provides only enough power for basic home use. First-time buyers are unlikely to feel restricted, but your needs may quickly outgrow this laptop.

• Read TechRadar’s Advent 5712 review

Graphics power is equally limited. The integrated Intel GPU is standard among laptops in this price range, but performance here is the lowest we have seen in some time. Video and DVDs play smoothly, and you can perform basic photo and video editing, but there isn’t the power for much more.

BENCHMARK MACHINE: Samsung Q45

Storage is also limited in comparison to its rivals. The 160GB hard drive suits basic needs, but is vastly bettered by both the Advent and HP. The dual-layer DVD rewriter lets you back up data to CD and DVD, but there is no support for flash storage cards.

Connectivity is also poor. Only two USB ports let you attach external peripherals, and they’re placed very close together, so it’s difficult to connect two devices simultaneously. Bluetooth lets you wirelessly sync external devices, however.

On its own merits, the eMachines E520- 571G16Mi is a decent laptop at this price. Against its rivals, however, it’s almost impossible to recommend, as both the HP Compaq Presario CQ60-214EM and Toshiba Satellite Pro L300-1FO are better options and outperform this laptop in nearly every way.

• Read TechRadar’s Toshiba Satellite Pro L300-1FO review

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Troubleshooting is curious skill. It’s part detective work, part methodical experimentation and part inspired guesswork, and part Zen Buddhism.

That’s a lot of parts but you need them all to be able to sift through a list of symptoms, identify the fault, work out an appropriate remedy and not go barking mad in the process.

Knowing how computers work is also handy, but it isn’t enough by itself and it’s much less important than you may think, now that all human knowledge is just a Google search away. Knowing the answers is all very well but the real art is asking the right questions. See what I mean about the Zen?

So I’m not going to give you a fish. I’m not even going to teach you how to fish. I’m going to build you a stinking trawler. Theoretically this ought to put me out of a job but in practice, the well of human stupidity seems to replenish itself far faster than I can pump it out, so there’s no need to worry on my behalf.

Before we begin, let us consider the tools of the trade, which are: 1. Another computer 2. A screwdriver 3. A credit card. That’s it.

The screwdriver I use has a nice flowery handle and a reversible, socket barrel with two double-ended bits so I can swap between Phillips and flat-head in two sizes each, but really, just the smaller of the two Phillips heads would do for 90 per cent of the time.

The other computer should be working and connected to the internet. Ideally, it ought to be a desktop PC of roughly the same vintage as the computer you wish to fix, but even a laptop is better than nothing.

Among the many things you will not need include: a set of watchmaker’s screwdrivers, needle-nose pliers, soldering iron, can of compressed air and anti-static wrist strap. I have owned and recommended all of these things in the past, but I’ve never actually used any of them except to impress people when I go round to their houses to fix something.

You’ll still see computer magazines listing this ‘essential troubleshooting toolkit’, but it’s honestly just there to fill up a page. You are now equipped to attack the five different types of computer problem, which we shall deal with in turn.

1. IT USED TO WORK AND NOW IT DOESN’T (”YOOT-WANID”)

This may sound like it could cover every computer problem but it’s actually quite specific. IUTWANID (pronounced yoot-wannid) means that your computer was working perfectly satisfactorily in the recent past and then something changed that either prevent the PC working at all or disables a significant component completely.

At its most extreme, this covers virtually every PC that won’t boot. At one time they did boot and now they don’t – that’s IUTWANID. Less severe examples include the sound suddenly disappearing from games or not being able to connect to the wireless network anymore.

To fix IUTWANID, you need to identify the thing that has changed. If you’ve installed software, try uninstalling it. Unplug any new hardware, use System Restore to roll back the registry. Don’t overreact and reformat – that’s effectively rolling back too far. You’ll need to undo changes in strictly reverse chronological order.

Sometimes – often even – it will seem that nothing has, in fact, changed recently on your system. This is a common delusion and must be resisted (or beaten out of you). Remember, it used to work. The temptation of course, is to assume that some bit in your computer has just broken, spontaneously and for no reason. This does happen but it’s very, very very rare.

A lot of the reason why computer troubleshooting is so frustrating for most people is because they leap too quickly to a ’something must be broken’ diagnosis and spend ages swapping stuff around inside their system to no effect. So make sure you have undone every change to your PC first – every software install, every driver update, every patch and every new cable.

If all of that draws a complete and utter blank, you can start cannibalising your other PC for components to begin ruling out broken stuff. But the snag is that almost everything you swap will require its own drivers and installing these is itself a change to the system. This is another reason for using this as a last resort.

2. THE ERROR MESSAGE (”I-GAME”)

Every time something doesn’t work on your system and instead you get a window that pops up and tries to blame you, we call this an error message. The standard operating procedure in this kind of situation is to type the error message into Google (on the spare PC, if necessary) and see what results come up.

The good thing about error messages is that you can guarantee that at least one other person has already figured out the solution. The bad thing is that lots of the solutions are idiotic. Yahoo Answers and Ask.com are frequented by mouth breathers and you should ignore whatever they advise.

Forums attached to games sites aren’t generally much better. What you really want is a hardware or software manufacturer’s forum; a serious computer site like Ars Technica or Tom’s Hardware or Wikipedia (or, if you’re truly desperate, you could always try asking the knowledgeable folk at forum.pcformat.co.uk or the TechRadar forums).

If you can’t find anything from a top-drawer resource like that, try refining your search. You’ll need to try a different part of the error message as your search string, leaving out those hexadecimal numbers, or putting the numbers back in. If that doesn’t work try putting different parts of the message in quotes.

If you get it right, you’ll find a decent hit in the first three pages of Google results. If it takes more than that to get any solid results, you’re doing it wrong. Read two or three different forum threads on the topic if you can and do whatever they say fixed the problem for them.

The Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) is the limiting case for error messages and if you find yourself facing one, your best resource is going to be Microsoft itself.

First stop should be to take the specific error code for a spin on the Knowledge Base and follow the instructions. Because a BSOD is pretty catastrophic event, you can also treat this as a kind of IUTWANID instead, if you like.

This isn’t usually very productive, though, because it ignores the specific information in the error code, but if the Knowledge Base page is all together far too vague to be of any help at all, and you know you’ve changed something recently, this might be the quicker route.

3. IT’S MORE RUBBISH THAN IT USED TO BE (”IM-ROOTY-OOTY-BEE”)

“Rubbish”, in this context nearly always means slower, but this category can also be applied to worsening sound quality, sticking keyboards or increasingly noisy fans. It’s different from IUTWANID, because it refers to a progressive, chronic deterioration.

If you had 80fps yesterday and only a mere 20 today, that’s IUTWANID, but if you used to be able to play games at acceptable frames rates and nowadays it seems much jerkier, then we call it IMRTIUTB. The key word in that last sentence is “seems”.

Often slowdown is more about your increasing expectations than decreasing performance. When your PC is new, you’re excited and predisposed to think well of it, so the thrashing sound of the hard disk feels like the revving of a powerful engine. That same PC two years later is old and grubby and subconsciously you would love to have an excuse to replace it; now the hard disk seems to wheeze asthmatically. Same noise, different spin.

There are two standard responses to IMRTIUTB; upgrade or reformat and reinstall. Both are wrong. Money spent on an upgrade delays the purchase of your next PC and offers much less benefit per pound than a new system. Upgrading is also like trying to balance a wobbly table; each new component you add creates a bottleneck or an incompatibility somewhere else and what started as just an extra 1GB of RAM quickly becomes a new motherboard, CPU, graphics card and PSU.

Reformatting and reinstalling seems like it will get you back to the halcyonicity of a new PC, but you have to remember that all the patches, updates and new drivers downloaded since then will still need to be reinstalled and they were responsible for much of the original slowdown.

Instead, IMRTIUTB is best addressed by uninstalling things. Any game, demo, shareware utility or Internet Explorer toolbar add-on that you do not depend on for your life needs to be removed. If you have more than eight icons in your System Tray, get rid of half of them.

All software thinks it’s so important that it must run constantly in the background. This is incorrect. Whatever it’s doing can wait. Possibly for eternity. Any other kind of IMRTIUTB is probably dirt. Take the lid off, blow away the dust, run your keyboard through the dishwasher and stop eating pizza while you play Crysis.

4. RANDOMLY, A THING HAPPENS (”WRATH”)

We live in a deterministic universe. The movement of stars, the radioactive decay of atoms and everything in between is controlled by immutable physical laws. We just don’t know what all of them are yet.

If your PC crashes, halts, fails or stymies you, every time something else happens, then it’s either IUTWANID or IGAEM. If it only sometimes happens, what you have is RATH. From a wide enough perspective, of course, random faults are just deterministic ones whose cause you haven’t managed to identify yet. But some causes are better at appearing random than other causes.

Overheating is the classic example of this. Your computer mostly works when you turn it on, but somewhere between a few minutes and an hour after that, it reboots or locks up or the graphics goes very peculiar or the sound goes screwy. Overheating is quite easy to diagnose – rebooting immediately, doesn’t help but shutting down and leaving it for a while does.

However, other ‘random’ influences are harder to isolate: radio frequency interference from nearby electrical equipment; heavy network traffic; dry solder joints on circuit boards, broken wires in cables; power surges in the domestic supply.

Be methodical, write down a hypothesis, devise a test, record the result and repeat the experiment to confi rm your conclusion. Or, just take it as a sign that it’s time for your next PC.

5. I CAN’T DO THE NEW THING (”ICY-DONUT”)

We all want to do the ‘New Thing’. The New Thing is exciting and wonderful. All the magazines are talking about the New Thing. Every website has banner ads reminding you that the New Thing will help you meet girls, earn more money and prevent cancer.

The New Thing is good because it’s new. But the New Thing doesn’t work on your old PC. It doesn’t fit in the slot, has the wrong number of pins, requires too much RAM and gives you unacceptable frame rates. The New Thing also doesn’t work in your new PC. It’s really quite buggy still, requires constant driver updates, doesn’t let you run in high resolution and causes all your USB ports to stop responding.

Faced with this, most of you will either blame the old PC or the New Thing. A few may even blame everything on the new PC. But in fact, the blame lies with you. It’s your fault for wanting the New Thing. It’s your fault for thinking you could just install it and skip merrily along. It’s entirely your fault for believing that the New Thing would be reliable and trouble-free.

This is not the way of the New Thing. Wherever possible, PCs should only have new software or hardware added in the first year of their lives. Doing this gives you a reasonable chance that your hardware configuration was considered when the developers were developing. After that year, you can continue to use your PC, of course; just don’t add anything new to it.

If the computer isn’t connected to the internet, you could, theoretically, stay in this holding pattern forever, but a networked PC will need to download Windows updates at the very least and your orbit will gradually decay. This, coupled with the fact that you will inevitably occasionally ignore this rule, which will lead to IMRTIUTB over time and when your PC is somewhere between 18 months and three-years-old, you will buy a new one.

This, if you absolutely must, is the time to invest in the New Thing. Stipulate to the supplier in writing that you are buying the PC for this purpose, thereby making compatibility a condition of sale. If possible, get the supplier to install the New Thing for you. Then it’s his fault (and therefore problem) if you get ICDNT.

The best approach of all, is not to do the New Thing at all. Wait a while; six months or a year. This will turn the New Thing into the Established Thing. The Established Thing is cheaper and has had the rough edges knocked off it. And the forums are already full of helpful advice should you run into IGAEM.

10 things that generally don’t help fix your PC

1. Scanning for viruses. Because it’s never a virus.

2. Buying computer books. They are big, heavy, expensive and out of date. They are also much too general to fix any actual problems. The internet is your friend and faster, and more relevant.

3. Defragmenting the hard disk. Disk fragmentation is much less of a deal than it used to be and it was never much of a deal to begin with. Any benefit you see is entirely down to the placebo effect.

4. Posting questions on random forums. Although forums do provide a useful source of advice, it’s rarely worth posting your own question. If it’s a common enough problem, someone will have done it already; if it isn’t, no one will know the answer. But this won’t stop them speculating fruitlessly.

5. Ringing tech support. There’s nothing they can diagnose that you can’t work out for yourself in half the time on the net. All the good tech support people get poached away from the front lines very quickly, anyway.

6. Reinstalling Windows. This just replaces your previous problem with another one – the more immediate task of getting a stable operating system installation up and running again. And when you eventually complete that particular task, your old problem will probably come back.

7. Switching to Linux. Frying Pan -> Fire.

8. Registry cleaning utilities. Another placebo remedy. It’s like worrying about how tidy the shoe cupboard is. Nobody sees it, so who cares?

9. Partitioning your hard disk. There’s nothing you can do with separate partitions that you cannot achieve more easily and with fewer side effects using folders.

10. Arbitrary lists. Because the last item is always made up.

How to fix your neighbour’s PC without sustaining unacceptable casualties

Fixing a neighbour’s PC is not like fixing your own. It’s more like the plot of Blackhawk Down. You go in, full of enthusiasm and good intention, fully expecting to be back in under 30 minutes. And a day and a half later, you’re still there, ordering replacement motherboards by overnight courier, flashing the BIOS and reinstalling Windows 95 from floppy disks, while RPGs and AK47 rounds slam into the side of the building.

It’s a brutal, dispiriting business that pleases no one, least of all your neighbour, who thought you were supposed to be the expert. To avoid this horrific scenario, you must not allow yourself to fall into the trap of using your time to try and save your neighbour money. Wherever possible, opt for the fastest, simplest solution, regardless of the cost to him. Here are some examples:

Neighbour: I upgraded the RAM yesterday and now my PC doesn’t seem to boot.
You: You should get a new PC.

Neighbour: I get this strange message on the screen when I start Windows.
You: You should get a new PC.

Neighbour: Crysis seems to slow right down whenever the children are surfing the internet upstairs.
You: You should get a new PC.

Neighbour: Can you help me install Vista SP2?
You: You should get a new PC.

Neighbour: How do I change the desktop wallpaper?
You: Get a new PC.

Neighbour: How do I…
You: NEW PC!

And relax…

So there you have it. PC troubleshooting distilled down to an essential oil that you can dab alluringly behind each ear.

With the secrets I have revealed here, you are equipped to solve any computer problem ever. If I catch any of you writing the back pages of any major computer magazines, there will be trouble, but otherwise this gift is yours to do with as you wish.

But there is one secret I haven’t revealed yet and it is this: nobody really knows what the hell they are doing when it comes to computers. They are all much too complicated to figure out properly and once you stumble on the thing that makes that particular problem go away, who is going to obsessively go back and double check that removing the fix really does make the problem come back?

If you manage to keep your PC running tolerably well until it’s time to buy a new one then you’re a winner. After a few years of doing this with different machines, you may develop a feel for the lie of the land. But none of this really amounts to actual expertise.

And if that’s true for you, then you should remember that it’s doubly true for that guy at work who is always upgrading his PC and hanging out in the tech forums. PC troubleshooters are charlatans of the worst sort… Except for me, of course. I am an actual PC genius.

——————————————————————————————————-

First published in PC Format Issue 226

Samsung will release the F480 Games Edition that has five pre-installed games, including “Pacman”, “Who wants to be a millionaire 2009? and “Millenium Poker.” The handset features a QVGA touchscreen display, a 5MP autofocus camera, Bluetooth and HSDPA connectivity. The Samsung F480 Games Edition will be released in Europe in mid-June 2009 for $564. [UnWiredView [...]

The Rock Pegasus 210 is a strong and stylish ultraportable which chooses to sacrifice power and performance for optimum mobility.

The 12.1-inch 1280 x 800-pixel screen provides bright and colourful images and is great for office work. However, it features a Super- TFT covering which can cause distracting reflections in changing light conditions.

The keyboard is small, and those with large hands may struggle at first. However, the keys move smoothly and accurately and feel solid to the touch. The touchpad is also quite small and it might be worth packing an external mouse in your laptop bag.

Durable chassis

Being constructed from magnesium-alloy and brushed aluminium, the chassis of the laptop is very durable. Weighing in at an impressive 1.4kg, it’s very light, which is great if you have portability in mind.

It also looks great; Rock has managed to strike a balance between consumer and corporate styling, so the laptop will look at home in both the living room and boardroom.

Unfortunately, the external quality is not mirrored internally. The outdated Intel GMA 950 graphics card is the least powerful variant here and performance scores drop accordingly. While basic image editing shouldn’t prove a problem, gaming is not an option and only the lightest of multimedia use is possible.

Performance is also limited due to the single-core Intel A110 processor which Rock has used in this laptop. While the chip is energy-efficient, providing an excellent battery life of 300 minutes, performance is sluggish even under a mild workload.

To combat these issues, Rock has opted to run Microsoft’s Windows XP Professional operating system instead of the more resource-intensive Windows Vista.

BENCHMARK MACHINE: Samsung Q45

A key selling point of this laptop is its HSDPA broadband connectivity, which is still rare in the majority of laptops. It means you aren’t confined to Wi-Fi hotspots if you need internet access, and you can get easily online whenever you’re in range of a mobile phone mast.

The 80GB hard drive isn’t very capacious and quite slow, further hindering performance, but it suits basic business use. A unique feature is the fact that the drive is shock-mounted. This means that if you drop the laptop or knock it off a table, your data will be kept safe.

While the Rock Pegasus 210 provides excellent portability, connectivity and styling, its low performance means it’s hard to recommend for anyone other than frequent business travellers. At this price point, there are better and more powerful laptops available to buy.

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One of the worst-kept tech secrets of recent times has finally been outed, as photos and details of Sony’s new PSP have been leaked online.

Images and video of the PSP Go apparently turned up in the latest edition of Sony’s Qore online magazine and were posted to the general web by Gaming Console Network.

No UMD drive

So far, it seems like most of the rumours were accurate - the PSP Go ditches the UMD drive in favour of 16GB of flash memory for storing games and there’s a new Bluetooth radio, although it’s not clear if the Wi-Fi link has been retained.

The top of the PSP Go slides up to reveal controls underneath, including just one analogue joystick. It seems likely that a Memory Stick slot will be included to augment the 16GB of flash memory.

Old PSP to stay

Significantly, the Go will not replace the standard PSP 3000 - that will remain on sale, so it’ll be interesting to see how Sony positions the pair and how much the newcomer will cost when it goes official at E3 this week.

Ericsson’s new W30 and W35 models will do a purely theoretical 7.2Mbps downstream and 2.0Mbps upstream on three HSPA bands in addition to quadband EDGE. Both models feature 802.11b / g and four Ethernet ports for routing the high-speed WWAN data. The W35 will be released in early June 2009. [Engadget]

Just as it improved the Wiimote controller by launching the MotionPlus, Nintendo has decided to power up its Wii Fit Balance Board by introducing a new, more precise version this autumn.

Wii Fit Plus will launch first in Japan, according to the reliable Nikkei newspaper, with a more accurate board and a slew of new exercises designed to attract a wider range of players.

Silver set too

The eight million global sales of the original Wii Fit package have clearly spurred Nintendo on to find even more takers by including gentler exercises for elderly people and more precise measurements for hardcore health nuts.

Also new to the game is an internet mode that allows exercisers to compare progress with remote friends in losing weight or whatever else their goals might be.

So far, Nintendo hasn’t commented on the reports, but we can expect to learn more at E3 this week.