News

Tom's Hardware has published their latest iteration of Best Graphics Cards For The Money, so if you're in the market for an upgrade, and have a fair idea of what your budget is, you should check this article out.

Best Graphics Cards For The Money: November 2012

We've got a quick follow-up to our survey. We've got four questions about Steam Game Night and what you'd like to see for reviews and benchmarks. Thanks for your feedback, and we appreciate your help.

Update: I lied, it now has five questions.

Windows 8 includes an updated “DirectX 11.1 Runtime” that supports Direct3D 11.1, updates Direct2D and DirectWrite, DXGI 1.2, and a revision of the Windows Imaging Component (WIC).

Portions of the “DirectX 11.1 Runtime” are being made available on Windows 7 Service Pack 1 via the Platform Update for Windows 7 Service Pack 1 and Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 (KB 2670838) included with the Internet Explorer 10 Release Preview for Windows 7. This includes the updated components above, but is limited to WDDM 1.1 drivers on Windows 7.

WSGF member Thebutcher has posted an interesting thread here outlining a possible open source future for SoftTH. If you're not familiar with SoftTH, it is a software multi-monitor solution that dates back to the days of the Matrox TripleHead2Go (TH2Go). Hence the name "SoftTH" (Software TripleHead). It was originally a software solution that allowed gamers to enjoy multi-monitor without the pricey investment of a TripleHead2Go.

Fast forward a few years, and AMD and NVIDIA both offer native hardware solutions for multi-monitor. However, SoftTH still offers one key unique feature - it allows for "non standard" configurations beyond 3x1 with identical monitors. SoftTH is known specifically for it's support for "PLP" (Portrait-Landscape-Portrait), which many users with a 20" - 30" - 20" configuration. All three monitors are 1200px tall, with the horizontal resolutions being 1200-2560-1200 pixels. It also allows for 1+3 configurations, and for all three monitors to be included in the gaming desktop. In fact, SofTH can support basically any configuration of monitors you can throw at it.

The one downside is that it only supports DX9, which is a little long in the tooth now. Thebutcher has broached the idea of making SoftTH open source, so that the WSGF and SoftTH communities can support the future development. He has posted a forum thread outlining this idea. If you are interested in supporting this effort, please hit up the source link and reply to Thebutcher.