4.0 has a lot of features which users like you and I don’t really need to know about. Texture swizzling? Awesome. Tessellation? Sure, as long as it’s not like whatever they used in Messiah — remember that game? These new toys for developers will make for a richer and faster graphical experience, to be sure, but I’m not going to list them off for you.

The big news for graphics is handhelds right now. Mobile gaming is blowing up and Microsoft can’t get a foot in the door. Hell, it’s getting its foot booted out from the other side. In the other corner, OpenGL (and the rest of the Open toolset) is setting itself up as being flexible enough to be applied on a handset, a laptop, or a desktop. It may not have DirectX 11 fidelity in water shaders or the latest normal mapping technique, but it’s damn close and what’s more, it doesn’t need a high end graphics card to be the library in use. Though I feel I should add that the games coming out on Windows Phone 7 Series and the Zune HD 2 are looking pretty awesome. This race isn’t over by far.

The OpenCL thing is great as well. If you remember, OpenCL is a set of tools for offloading certain tasks from the CPU onto the GPU, when those tasks are better served by parallel processors. Loading web pages may work fine on your Snapdragon, but decoding video will have it at 100% and drain your battery — better to send it over to the GPU. The GPU computing thing hasn’t quite taken off yet, but it’s pretty much inevitable that it’ll start being implemented on a low level, since it can improve the user experience so dramatically.

I’m always happy to see this kind of steady progress. More capabilities, more competition, and better devices for everyone, OpenGL-based or not. If you’re interested, there’s much more information available.

www.crunchgear.com
www.khronos.org

Some people were surprised when Apple announced that its new MacBooks could come with two Nvidia GPUs, but that’s nothing compared to what Toshiba has just announced. The company’s latest Qosimo laptops come with three GPUs, and they’re set up in a sensible configuration too.

We’re not talking an extreme 3-way SLI laptop here. Instead, the laptops come with an integrated GeForce 9400M for quiet day-to-day work on battery power, and then have a pair of GeForce 9800M GTS cards in SLI mode that can kick in when you need fast 3D frame rates.

Apple was the first company to announce that it was using Nvidia’s new GeForce 9400M GPU when it launched its new MacBooks last month, and Nvidia has since announced a desktop motherboard chipset based on the technology. The GPU has just 16 stream processors clocked at 1.4GHz as standard, with a 580MHz GPU core clock. It might not be very powerful when it comes to running Crysis, but it has enough power to enable Aero glass effects in Windows Vista, and it hardly matters when you have an SLI setup waiting in the wings.

Meanwhile, the GeForce 9800M GTS features 64 stream processors, so it’s not as powerful as your average GeForce 9800 desktop GPU, but a pair of them should be able to make these laptops veritable gaming machines. It’s also interesting to see a high-profile company such as Toshiba taking a big interest in the gaming laptop industry, similarly to Dell and HP, to the point where it’s installing three GPUs. It’s also worth noting that the three GPUs could also help to speed up the laptop when running GPGPU apps.

Toshiba’s vice president of product development for Toshiba’s US digital products division, Carl Pinto, explained that Toshiba ‘wanted to deliver an extreme-performance gaming machine that gives gamers a complete, non-compromising system in a laptop form factor.’ He added that ‘The combination of the NVIDIA GPUs and chipset allowed us to achieve a high level of performance, quality and flexibility that our customers are asking for, at a competitive starting price.’

The Qosimo X305-Q706 costs $1,999 US (£1,257) in the US, although we haven’t seen any UK pricing on the laptops yet. The system comes with a 2.2GHz Core 2 Duo P8400 and 4GB of RAM, while the costlier X305-Q708 comes with a quad-core 2.53GHz Core 2 Extreme QX9300 CPU. Would you be interested in laptops such as these for a portable gaming machine, as well as general laptops, or would you rather stick with your desktop? Let us know your thoughts.

www.custompc.co.uk