AMD show us the new TressFX.

AMD has announced a partnership with Square Enix studio Crystal Dynamics and that will bring gamers unprecedented realism.

The first step is : TressFX Hair engine.

Seam the TressFX is not exclusive to AMD and it works on any DirectX11 card, like: Order-Independent Transparency (OIT) or High Definition Ambient Occlusion (HDAO).

Also the TressFX will really be able to benefit from high DirectCompute performance.

Read more and see sample shots posted to AMD blog.

Catzilla the new graphics benchmark .

Catzilla is an OpenGL 4 and Direct3D 11 graphics benchmark for Windows and has been developped by Plastic, a Polish demogroup.

The benchmark uses a parallel graphics engine that takes advantage of multi-core CPUs.

The size of this it's a 500 MB.

This benchmark is in beta phases and working with OpenGL 4.0 and DirectX 9 or 11.

You can try it with all the Windows platform (64-bit and 32-bit) Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8 .

You can download the installer from here.

Heaven DX11 Benchmark is Back

UNIGINE Corp. released today an improved version (3.0) of its renown Heaven DX11 Benchmark based on its proprietary UNIGINE™ engine. Great looking as ever and containing many technical improvements, it now runs on Mac and supports for variety of new hardware, including extended support for multi-monitor configurations.

"It's very inspiring that more and more hardware testing professionals as well as tech enthusiasts find Heaven Benchmark useful. Our technology platform is constantly growing and we can bring Heaven Benchmark to new platforms and new hardware", said Denis Shergin, CEO of UNIGINE Corp.

What's New? Added Mac OS X version compatible with 10.7+ (no tessellation). Added support for Intel HD 3000 GPU (no tessellation). Improved support for multi-monitor configurations. Added support for NVIDIA 3D Surround (multi-monitor stereo 3D). Enhanced NVIDIA 3D Vision support. New cross-platform launcher without .NET dependencies. Fixed Phoronix Test Suite compatibility issue. Fixed minor visual artifacts. Improved compatibility with Mesa drivers. Improved detection of new GPUs.

Read more here.

SlimDX and SharpDX frameworks.

These two applications come to support developers who use DirectX.
First SlimDX is a free open source framework that enables developers to easily build DirectX applications using .NET technologies.
SlimDX supports a wide range of APIs, operating systems, and configurations. All versions of Windows XP, Vista, Server 2003, Server 2008, and 7 are supported, for both 32 and 64 bit. There is a minimum requirement of .NET 2.0
See more here.
The second, SharpDX is intended to be used as an alternative managed DirectX framework. The API is generated automatically from DirectX SDK headers, with AnyCpu target, meaning that you can run your application on x86 and x64 platform, without recompiling your project or installing assemblies into the GAC.
Full support for the DirectX API.
Managed platform independent .NET API.
See more here.
What I don't like about the two programs and their official websites...
The tutorials are weak and few.
Documentation is not complete.
sharpdx comes with two zip archives that would be enough to develop an application.
SlimDX installation has two executables:
. NET Runtime 2.0 End User and Developer SDK
The result is the same as sharpdx, a lot of source code with some compiled binaries.
I tried to run the samples for DirectX 9 but failed.
I use DirectX 9c on a Asus Eee PC 1000H with 1GB RAM.
Although I was expecting more, these applications have disappointed me.