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Ray tracing is the current holy grail of gaming graphics, the rendering technique that might finally make the licensed game based on Pixar’s latest look as good as the film itself. But, the typically random nature of rays has made rendering them on traditional hardware inefficient, a problem Caustic Graphics claimed to have solved, and is now backing that up by giving PC Perspective some further details and demos. The company’s tech will rely on a new graphics co-processor called the Ray Tracing Processing Unit (RTPU), working in concert with existing 3-D accelerators to deliver rays at frame rates high enough for interactive applications. How high? Early hardware dubbed CausticOne (that giant slab of silicon above) manages 3 – 5 frames-per-second in the demonstration video after the break. That’s not nearly enough for twitchy first-person shooters, but second-gen hardware due next year is looking to deliver 14 times that — plenty to get your high-reflectivity frag on.
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Wait, what’s this? Intel admitting that its X18-M and X25-M SSDs do actually have the potential to slow after extended use? After the company flat out denied allegations brought forth by PC Perspective earlier this year, it has now quietly pushed out a v1.1 update for the 80GB and 160GB versions of the aforementioned devices. All we’re told is that it brings along “several continuous improvement optimizations intended to provide the best possible user experience,” but there’s absolutely no denying what it’s really aiming to fix. Intel still maintains that the likelihood of users experiencing any long-term issues are next to nothing, but we’d suggest applying the update just in case. Wouldn’t want to be missing out on any lightning fast read / write rates, now would you?

[Via HotHardware]

Read – Intel firmware update
Read – Updated firmware review
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Here’s some perspective: when MCE first released its internal Mac Pro Blu-ray burner, it boasted 2X speeds for a hefty $699 price tag. Cut to present day, when the new generation of the drive that’s a noticeably faster 8X Blu-ray read / write and 16X DVD±R/W, all for a hair under $400. Works with Adobe Premier Pro, Final Cut Pro and Roxio Toast 10 Pro … but if you want to play studio Blu-ray movies, you’ll have to either dual boot Windows or wait until some indeterminant time when Apple adds BD support for OS X. Them’s the breaks.

[Via Macworld]
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Rough morning for Nokia. After having its trio of new music-oriented handsets leaked, Gartner goes and releases a set of unflattering sales figures related to Nokia’s beleaguered smartphones. While smartphone sales overall increased 3.7% in Q4, Nokia’s share slid from 50.9% to “just” 40.8% on 15.6 million units. While many, including Samsung and HTC gained, it was RIM and Apple that made the biggest advances. RIM increased its share of the lucrative market to 19.5% (7.4 million units) from 10.9% while Apple more than doubled its share, up from 5.2% to 10.7% (4.1 million units). Keeping things in perspective: smartphones accounted for only 12% of all mobile device sales for the quarter. There’s a method to Nokia’s mid- to low-end handset madness.
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Rough morning for Nokia. After having its trio of new music-oriented handsets leaked, Gartner goes and releases a set of unflattering sales figures related to Nokia’s beleaguered smartphones. While smartphone sales overall increased 3.7% in Q4, Nokia’s share slid from 50.9% to “just” 40.8% on 15.6 million units. While many, including Samsung and HTC gained, it was RIM and Apple that made the biggest advances. RIM increased its share of the lucrative market to 19.5% (7.4 million units) from 10.9% while Apple more than doubled its share, up from 5.2% to 10.7% (4.1 million units). Keeping things in perspective: smartphones accounted for only 12% of all mobile device sales for the quarter. There’s a method to Nokia’s mid- to low-end handset madness.
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Ahh, how cute. Mr. Robot wants you to hold his USB head. Better than taking yours, we guess. $25 and he’ll harass your keys about his superior 4GB capacity. Perspective on the harsh realities of robot relations pictured after the break.

[Via Pocket-lint]
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Did you catch the news yesterday about those chronic performance problems that cropped up in a trio of Intel X25-M SSDs under review by PC Perspective? Intel apparently did, promptly responding and identifying what it believes to be the issue: the testers. The review alleged that the drives’ write algorithms, intended to evenly spread wear and extend their lives, result in extreme fragmentation and major decreases in performance. Intel is saying it wasn’t able to replicate the results, that “the synthetic workloads they use to stress the drive are not reflective of real world use,” and that “the benchmarks they used to evaluate performance do not represent what a PC user experiences.” The reviewers were largely just copying files around and installing/uninstalling applications, which sounds fairly realistic to us. We’re thinking these two aren’t going to agree to disagree on this one, and that there will be more updates to come.