PC on a USB stick

 

The games developer David Braben showed a Raspberry Pi. In essence that is a complete PC squeezed on a small circuit board and has a HDMI on one end and USB on other. The idea is simple – plug in cables and start with Linux. If you think it is just a toy you may be surprised. Here are the hardware specifications:

• 700MHz ARM11
• 128MB of SDRAM
• OpenGL ES 2.0
• 1080p30 H.264 high-profile decode
• Composite and HDMI video output
• USB 2.0
• SD/MMC/SDIO memory card slot
• General-purpose I/O
• Open software (Ubuntu, Iceweasel, KOffice, Python)
• 12 MPixel camera

The big question is “How much?” Answer: $25 (twenty five dollars).

David came up with the idea because as a child he had ICT and in fact it was typing class. He is now trying to give kids a better chance to get into computing, programming and become true integral part of their life skills.

Here is a video showing Raspberry Pi

Raspberry Pi hardware with cables and camera

Ubuntu running on Raspberry Pi.

More information about it is available here and here.

Fermi technology unveiled

nVidia has revealed details of it's new CUDA platform - Fermi. Development of Fermi was greatly influenced by feedback from development of G80 and GT200 chipsets. Main areas of focus for development of Fermi were:

• Improve Double Precision Performance—while single precision floating point performance was on the order of ten times the performance of desktop CPUs, some GPU computing applications desired more double precision performance as well.
• ECC support—ECC allows GPU computing users to safely deploy large numbers of GPUs in datacenter installations, and also ensure data-sensitive applications like medical imaging and financial options pricing are protected from memory errors.
• True Cache Hierarchy—some parallel algorithms were unable to use the GPU’s shared memory, and users requested a true cache architecture to aid them.
• More Shared Memory—many CUDA programmers requested more than 16 KB of SM shared memory to speed up their applications.
• Faster Context Switching—users requested faster context switches between application programs and faster graphics and compute interoperation.
• Faster Atomic Operations—users requested faster read-modify-write atomic operations for their parallel algorithms.

With these goal in mind nVidia developed Fermi as significant improvement of predecessor. The table below illustrates these differences.

GPU	G80	GT200	Fermi
Transistors	681 Million	1.4 Billion	3 Billion
CUDA cores	None	240	512
Double precision floating point capability	None	30 FMA ops/clock	256 FMA ops/clock
Single Precision Floating Point Capability	128 MAD ops/clock	240 MAD ops/clock	512 FMA ops/clock
Warp schedulers (per SM)	1	1	2
Special Function Units (SFUs) / SM	2	2	4
Shared Memory (per SM)	16 Kb	16 Kb	Config 48KB or 16KB
L1 Cache (per SM)	None	None	Config 48 KB or 16 KB
L2 Cache (per SM)	None	None	768 KB
ECC Memory Support	No	No	Yes
Concurrent Kernels	No	No	Up to 16
Load/Store Address Width	32 bit	32 bit	64 bit

In simpler words some of the features of Fermi GPU include 384 bit memory interface supporting up to a 6 GB of GDDR5 DRAM memory. Double precision calculation performance is about 4x faster, fluid collision calculation in PhysX for convex shapes is 2.7x faster, application context switching is 10x faster.

More details on Fermi can be found in Fermi white paper.

To make things easier for developers nVidia is working on Nexus – integration of CUDA C, OpenCL and DirectCompute into Visual Studio. It is expected to be released very soon – this month. In the mean time here is a video of functionality that it will provide.

HRD = Hard Rectangular Drive

While majority of large storage manufacturers are focusing on more or less traditional methods (SSD) DataSlide is taking different approach. DataSlide is developing Hard Rectangular Drive (HRD). What is that?

This image shows basics of HRD.

What are advantages of this technology? From DataSlide:

capitalizes on standard base process technologies
to create a dramatically new way to store and retrieve data with magnetic media:
1. Leverage LCD process
2. Use standard HDD sputtering/plating MEMS process
3. Use HDD perpendicular media DSSC/Oerlikon-Balzers coatings

In addition to this it also features:

1. A piezoelectric actuator keeps the rectangular media in precise motion 

2. A diamond solid lubricant coating protects the surfaces for years of worry free service

3. A massively parallel 2D array of magnetic heads reads from or writes to up to 64 embedded heads at a time 

According to DataSlide it will produce 500MB/sec with less than 4W for magnetic storage device.
Technology wise, there is one head per secor with symmetric read/write. According to specification HRD is reliable as HDD (or better), can have capacity from 80 GB to 2 TB, 160,000 rd/wt compared to 35,00rd / 3,000wt for SSD.

DataSlilde has partnered with Oracle to embed Berkeley Database into storage drive. Full article is available here.

DataSlide’s Hard DB fits Oracle’s Embedded Global Business Units OEM Charter by incorporating BerkeleyDB into the actual storage device itself (essentially a low energy, cool running, high performance. shock resistant hard drive) to make a ‘smart’ storage device. The potential applications are many and varied. Examples are TCP/IP based systems and video applications requiring multiple concurrent streams, media indexing, fast positioning. forward. back. skip. scene/track will have significant perfoniiance improvements with this winning architecture.

Western Digital Solid State Disks

Western Digital has announced their latest product line of solid state disks, SiliconDrive III

Three different drives are offered, 2.5” and 1.8”. Details are listed in table below.

Feature	SiliconDrive III 2.5-inch SATA Drive	SiliconDrive III 1.8-inch Micro SATA Drive	SiliconDrive III 2.5-inch PATA Drive
Interface	SATA 3 Gb/s	SATA 3 Gb/s	PATA ATA-7
Max R/W speed	100/80 MB/s	100/80 MB/s	85/60 MB/s
PowerArmor	30GB to 120GB	30GB to 60GB	30GB to 120GB
SiSMART	Standard	Standard	Standard
SolidStor	Standard	Standard	Standard

PowerArmor feature drive corruption from an ungraceful power-down, brownout, power spike or unstable voltage level.

SiSMART is ability to read and display the remaining amount of a drive’s useable life.

SolidStor technology makes designers, supply chain managers and OEMs confident that their storage system choice exceeds the high performance, high reliability and low total cost of ownership.

At the moment there are no prices announced for these drives and it would be nice to see them in a benchmark.

AMD demos DirectX 11 GPU

Earlier this month At a press conference in Taipei at Computex 2009 AMD has demonstrated its DirectX 11 GPU. Main features of DX 11 are:

• Down-level hardware and operating system support
• Improved multithreaded device
• New hardware stages for tessellation
• Improved texture compression
• Shader Model 5.0
• Compute shader

According to the article DirectX was influenced and developed on ATI graphics and they are proud to bring world’s first DX 11 GPU.

AMD has a long track record of delivering pioneering features that have gone on to become mainstays in the DirectX experience, and we’re doing it again with two mature, AMD-developed technologies in DirectX 11 – tessellation and the compute shader – both of which enable a better DirectX 11 experience for consumers.

Here is an example of tessellation that enables modelling with great detail.

To see it in motion check this video.

When they talk about influencing development of DirectX here is the video to support it.

Most interesting part of the video at the end of video showing DX 11 features (but it is very brief) at about 2’03” into the video.
There is another, much longer video showing use of compute shader for various aspects of scene management, AI etc.

All we have to do now is wait until DX11 and these graphics cards to become mainstream. Then we can see some really nice graphics running at full 60 FPS constantly.

3D hypsographic shaded print

It is interesting how things coincide…

In end of May I was in Wellington teaching “Cartography with ArcGIS” course and thought “I should write a post about that 3D print I did...” And several days later there is a post about 3D prints on Free Geography Tools blog.

Back to the 3D print I did. The print was done quite a while ago, for a NZ ESRI User Group Conferecne  in October-November of 2006. About one month before the Conference I got an e-mail with brochure about 3D printers from Contex. One of the vendors at the conference has these printers but they don’t offer print services. Eagle Technology is the main sponsor of the conference so was in contact with vendors. Luckily, there is another company in Auckland that has 3D printer and it is interested in collaboration. That company is 3D Print. When we met they showed me promotional GIS/mapping model they have. It was a standard size (30x30cm) tile with a city in flat area with satellite image draped on top. It wasn’t impressive since tallest feature on print was about 2cm tall. I have suggested that we put something together – I can provide data/model and they would print it. So we started working on this project.

I have access to topographic data for whole New Zealand including the 20m contours lines.  The question was what area to choose. One of immediate candidates was Wellington area for several reasons: conference is held in Wellington and terrain has interesting features. It didn’t take me long to create a DEM and hillshade from available data. Then I started experimenting with the colours. I have experimented a bit with elevation colour ramps (like described in this post). Here are some test combinations applied on top of Swiss hillshading. There are subtle differences visible in highest mountain region in southeast.




Here is one of the first tries I liked the best.

This is looking promising and I though it would be nice if I could get bathymetry data for Cook Straight. Luckily, National institute of Water & Atmospheric Research (NIWA) was very interested and I got the shapefile data for Cook Straight. And it was really exciting to work with the data and see the results. Cook Straight has very interesting features as you can see. From supplied data I created the DEM as displayed below.

Next step is to combine two datasets. The result is shown below.

Now it is back to the colour schemas. NIWA has a colour ramp they are using but I didn’t like it that much.

And here is why. On its own I wouldn’t mind using it but it in my opinion it does not work well with elevation tint.
 
Here are some test screenshots.


After some testing I have decided to go with blue colour ramps and here are most likely candidates.



With colours almost sorted there was a next challenge – what data format will work the best for 3D print? According to printer’s manual it will work with VRML, 3DS and DXF/DWG data. I had a bit of problems with exporting data as VRML (I was using ArcGIS 9.2 pre-release then). Once exported VRML didn’t really give us the result we were expecting. There was lot of trouble reading the file and getting the texture (picture correctly positioned on top of model). In next try, I made a 3DS file and send it to 3D Print. Few days later I have also sent a DXF file and the image file of the final colour separately so they could experiment and choose the best option.

Eventually, the figured out the best data format and the way to print this (I am not too sure what format was used in the end) and they made first test 3D print from supplied data and this was the result.


Looking at this we have agreed that this is nowhere near to what we have expected. To make it better 3D Print made it bigger, to cover 4 tiles and to have a base and side walls. Each tile is 30x30cm and height depends on the features of terrain. The result was much better. The model was in our Auckland office and then taken to Wellington by one of our staff members about two weeks before the conference. Unfortunately, two of four tiles got broken in transport because the box with print was checked in at the airport. And that was under two week before the Conference!

Then the good guys at 3D Print decided to do more tweaking and make another run/copy of the model. The main reason for tweaking were the colours. All colours came out lighter then everybody has expected or liked. To my surprise, new model looked so much better than the first one.

Here are the photos of the second model taken with my Sony DSC P7 camera (old and not very good).


As you can see even new printed tiles broke but this is not visible when put together.
For the print we have included logos of all parties involved. Can you spot the spike under letter A in EAGLE?

There are some nice features of the terrain visible even if I use just two tiles.

Here are some close up shots to illustrate terrain and undersea features.



On the photo above you can see ‘terraces’ result of undersea configuration – large areas with very small slope. The same effect is noted on Free Geography Tools blog.

For this print we decided not to use solid base in order to save time and material for printing. Here is an underside of one tile.


Lessons learned
This was an interesting experience for several reasons. Firstly, working with new printing technology. Using 3D prints can really bring out the characteristics of the terrain (in this case). These are especially attractive for students and for people who can’t easily create mental picture of an area looking at the topographic map. 3D print as a company was very keen to work with us and demonstrate use of this technology in GIS and mapping.

Choosing symbology was quite difficult considering I had to combine bathymetry and terrain in single product. This would not be that difficult if it was a medium with known characteristics, like paper. In the first try colours used looked fine on screen and test print on paper but when used in 3D print they came out pale. To highlight the coastline I used orange colour that was too strong any line symbol was too wide. Lakes and swamp outlines were also too strong and too wide.

Printing in 3D is not cheap. One tile 30x30cm costs around $300 NZ. All together this printing costs were around $3,000 NZ. Once printed you should take care of the prints since there are quite fragile.
If I get the opportunity to do this again I would be delighted and hopefully the process would be less troublesome.

SATA 3.0 specification released

SATA-IO has released specification for SATA 3.0 standard on May 27th. Specification states transfer speed of up to 6 Gb/s and enhancements to support multimedia applications. Some of these enhancements are:

• A new Native Command Queuing (NCQ) streaming command to enable isochronous data transfers for bandwidth-hungry audio and video applications
• An NCQ Management feature that helps optimize performance by enabling host processing and management of outstanding NCQ commands
• Improved power management capabilities
• A small Low Insertion Force (LIF) connector for more compact 1.8-inch storage devices
• A connector designed to accommodate 7mm optical disk drives for thinner and lighter notebooks
• Alignment with the INCITS ATA8-ACS standard

As you would expect it is backward compatible with earlier implementations. Full presentation containing more information can be viewed here.
It should not be too long before we start seeing SATA 3.0 drives around since about 98% of all desktop hard disks today are SATA drives.

Carbon nanotube data storage

One of the major problems with today’s ways of storing data is lifetime of the media. I am guessing that you are making copies of your 4-5 old CDs so you could view or edit your old family photos. I’ve done that few times and will do it few more times before we get something more permanent. Digital archiving methods seems to be of relatively short lifespan – from 5 years ford CDs to 20 for computer disks. 
Possible solution is in use of carbon nanotubes. This method is described in an article in Nano Letters site. The technique is briefly described here

…technique of placing a single iron crystal only a few billionths of a meter wide inside a hollow carbon nanotube. Like diamonds, nanotubes are among the most stable structures in existence. Once inserted into the tubes, the iron nanocrystals act as data bits, physically sliding from one end of the tube to the other in response to an electric current and in the process registering either a "1" or a "0" in the binary language of computers.

It is still long way to go before this becomes a prototype but potential is there. For potential capacity here is what the abstract says:

The shuttle memory has application for archival storage, with information density as high as 10¹² bits/in², and thermodynamic stability in excess of one billion years.

All we have to do is wait until someone actually start making these devices.

Sharp LCD screen uses 5 primary colours

According to recent news here and here (I was unable to locate the source for this) Sharp made a full HD LCD display that is using 5 instead of usual 3 primary colours. In this model additional colours are cyan and yellow. According to Sharp this device displays images "identical in appearance to real-world objects."
Display resolution is 1920x1080 with 60.5” screen size and will be demonstrated in San Antonio, Texas at Society for Information Display Symposium.
The main advantage of this display is ability to display almost entire Pointer colour space. Once these displays become common on the market this will make visualization lot better and easier assuming that software manufactures start making drivers for this type of display. According to articles brass, skin tones, petals are really hard ones to reproduce and this screen just may be the solution.
We may see more news about this product after Sunday so stay tuned.

Students develop 3D computer interface

A group of students at Northeastern University has developed a prototype of 3D computer interface. This gave them 1st place at Senior Capstone competition for 2009. This is still a prototype but operation of it looks similar to what Tom Cruise was doing in the Minority Report.



But for this interface you don’t need the gloves to manipulate and interact with applications.
The prototype is working fine but it is a bit bulky. That does not diminish its functionality and applications.
Here is the video of test drive (4:40 long).


3D Computer Interface from Free Flow on Vimeo.


Once big companies get on hold of this I’m sure it will become small and fine tuned so we all can have the Minority Report experience.

Are gaming cards good enough for workstations?

Being member of support group at work every now and then I get a question like “Can I use gaming card for GIS? This one is really powerful, my ArcGlobe should fly on this thing!”
In more general sense this is a question of gaming vs workstation graphics cards. To answer this question Tom’s Hardware did a benchmark between nvidia GTX 260 and Quadro FX 4800.
Quadro FX 4800


XFX GTX 260


Tom’s  Hardware benchmark is quite comprehensive and in first part they are comparing Quadro 4800 card against other Quadro and ATI FireGL set of cards.
Results are bit of the mix, but FX 4800 is very close to the top in almost every benchmark.
Finally on page 10 of the benchmark results of test for GTX 260 are listed against FX4800. The number are quite impressive, some of test were a whole magnitude larger for FX 4800.

Test from Viewperf 10	GTX 260	FX 4800
3dS Max 04	11.53	46.23
catia-02	15.22	57.95
ensigth-02	18.34	54.47
maya-02	35.71	221.71
proe-04	14.72	60.59
sw-01	12.94	128.71
tcvis-01	4.77	39.36
ugnx-01	5.89	33.72

In their conclusion they sum it up quite nicely:

A Quadro FX 4800 moves up to 10 times faster when running workstation applications than the GeForce GTX 280. This leads swiftly to a clear and inescapable conclusion: there's no good reason to use a GeForce graphics card for workstation applications. It just doesn't pay.

The problem is that this test does not includes GIS applications, namely ArcGIS.  I would love to see a application testing graphics performance in ArcGIS and ArcGlobe. One of major problems might be the fact that most GIS processing (speaking of graphics only) is 2D not 3D. In that regard I believe the gaming cards are doing a fine job. Again, we need a test tool to prove this.
For 3D performance in GIS i tried using Fraps. Fraps can show current frame rate on the screen or 3D window. In ArcGLobe it was constant 25 fps (if memory serves me well).
If any ArcObjects developers are reading this I would love to test your ArcGlobe benchmark tool… If you are working on one please e-mail me on ZergOne@gmail.com.

How to build supercomputer from PS3 consols?

Once you get bored playing games on Playstation 3 you can get few more and build yourself a supercomputer cluster. If you don't know how to do this don't despair. Advanced Technology & Manufacturing Center from University of Massachusetts Dartmouth has just the thing you need - detailed instructions how to set up your cluster.

The process is relatively simple:

1. Install Linux (in this case Fedora 8)
2. Set up Message Passing Interface and Cell SDK
3. Start number crunching

Of course I have left out all details from steps 1 and 2 but this should not be very difficult.
The resources page may be visited quite often especially if you are not familiar with Cell chip and graphics side of PS3.

Comment from a Professor Gaurav Khanna from UMASS about PS3:

For the same cost, you can build your own supercomputer and it works just as well if not better. Plus, you can use it over and over again, indefinitely.

So, don't turn off your PS3 yet!

USB 3.0 specifications and performance

About month ago Intel has released USB 3.0 or "SuperSpeed" USB specifications. It is not released to public but to technology partners and manufactures. Get it from here if you have xHCI contributor agreement. Release of this information was not as simple as it sounds. Intel was accused of withholding the information so they could get a head start in design and manufacture of first boards and devices.

Eventually, information was released and USB 3.0 will have the following specifications:

 

• 5 Gb/s data rate
• Fast Sync-N-Go
• download 27 GB in 60 - 70 sec
• Optimized power efficiency
• lower active and idle power requirements
• Backward compatibility with USB 2.0
• new devices interoperable with USB 2.0 platform
• hosts support USB 2.0 legacy devices

 

USB 3 cable interface

 

 

Results of speed test. If this is real life test this means it is very fast.

 

First commercial devices with USB 3.0 are not expected before 2010 and for widespread use until 2012.

Solid State Disk comparison

Solid State Disks (SSD) are becoming an option for your server, workstation or notebook. Deciding which one to get is never easy. If you are considering getting one you should do a lot of research. Tom's Hardware has an excellent article about current state of SSDs.

 

It also clarifies differences between the types of SSD - SLC and MLC.

All the premium products are based on Single-Level Cell (SLC) flash memory. You can identify these by their high write performance and I/O performance.

And then there is the flash SSD mainstream, although we’re having a hard time declaring this a “mainstream” segment when it still averages several hundred dollars per drive. The mainstream differs from the high-end in its utilization of Multi-Level Cell (MLC) flash products. These can be read quickly, but their write and random access performance generally lag behind.

Then they compare 14 SSD hard drives in various test configurations for workstation and a notebook.  Make sure you have enough time for reading, the review is 19 pages long and as usual, loaded with graphs of performance results.

The tests are

• access time, interface
• read/write, throughput
• PCMark benchmark
• I/O performance
• workstation performance
• streaming read and performance
• power consumption at DVD playdack

 

Finally the conclusions - there is no a single drive that will rule them all. Instead, consider the criteria for choosing SSD - performance, cost or both.

For me these drives are still too expensive, too small to go and buy. Most of drives reviewed are 32 or 64 GB. In my laptop I have 100 GB hard disk and I'm struggling with free space (I have to move data to external USB drive). Definitely when capacity increases (for mainstream products) to 128 or 256 GB I'll have another look at the cost/performance of SSD hard drives. For sure, they are here to stay and in long(er) run replace magnetic hard drives.

256 GB Solid State Disk announced by Samsung

So far solid state disks (SSD) were (and still are) expensive and have relatively small capacity. This is about to change. Samsung has announced that is has developed fast, 2.5" SSD with 256 GB capacity.

 

 

 

Disk is very compact in size, 100.3 x 69.8 x 9.5 mm. Interface used is SATA II  and should have sequential read speed of 200 MB/sec and write speed is 160 MB/sec. Mean time between failures is 1 M hours (over 115 years) with power consumption of 0.9 W in active mode.

Production is expected to start before end of year for 2.5" model. So far there are no indications of price for this little gem...

Multi-touch sensor video

Jeff Han is a founder of the Perceptive Pixel, a company dedicated to developing multi-touch sensors, promoting and developing applications for these. Their product is called Interactive Media Wall.

Watching Jeff working with it is very impressive and elegant in the same time. If you watch the videos posted on the web site you'll see what do I mean.

In video clip shown on the main page you'll notice almost non-existing user interface. Everything is based mostly on intuition and our habits. For example, to zoom in to picture (or video) place your fingers on it and move them apart. Picture is stretched to required size. Moving fingers closer will zoom out (shrink the picture)

To see this at action have a look at Jeff working here.

There are some elements that I have seen before but not in his previous demos. This includes some of the "physics" applied to the objects on the screen. Application of physics to desktop is demonstrated very nicely in 2007 (short post from June last year). Another common point between the two is use of gestures.

 

Some of examples where multi-touch sensors are used include maps and their use or manipulation. Here are some stills from his video.

 

If you are impressed and want to get one of these first make sure you have enough room because it is  8x3 feet big. And bring some money. something like $100,000!

 

Of course, they are not only one working with this technology. Microsoft has it's own Surface (my earlier post about it is here). Microsoft (Bill Gates himself) demonstrated "TouchWall" at the Microsoft CEO summit and they see great potential in this technology.

It's a natural extension of Office. We can take spreadsheet, word processing, presentation data, and get it into here.

This could be a good thing since they want to drive prices down so it becomes "kind of whiteboard".

I wish I could have one of these whiteboards...

GPU or not to GPU, that is the question

Not too long ago nVidia purchased Ageia and their PhysX technology (I wrote about this before). The whole physics will be (already is?) implemented as software solution in CUDA technology. Now GPU is working faster and doing more work than CPU! But wait! There's more! We can have not 2, not 3 but 4 graphics card in SLI mode!! Of course it will cost you dearly but you will get quite a significant performance boost.

On the other hand, Intel is saying who need's graphic card when you have 8 cores. To back up their statement they have demonstrated fire spreading generated on the Nahalem processors. Check out the video and article here. So, all you need is 8 or more cores and you're all set.

So, what it is going to be? I think it will be a status quo for a while. Graphics card manufactures will keep pumping out newer and better cards, CPUs will be multicore with 16 or 32 cores. The bottleneck is most likely to be the software - namely operating system and the applications. It is not easy to write software that does decent multi threading support for 4 cores not to mention 16 or more cores.

Anyway end users (and gamers) can expect better and more realistic games and even more eye candy.

Intel cut prices for Quad Core CPUs

A few days ago Intel decided it is time to play hard against AMD. So, Intel has dropped prices for a whole range of the CPUs. Most significant change is for Core 2 Quad Q6700. Price is now 50% cheaper - US$266. Another CPU with 50% price cut is Quad Core Xeon X3230 - US$255.

Core 2 Quad Q6700

This is not the only CPU that has price slashed. Other CPUs with notable price drops are Core 2 Duo E6850 (31% price drop), Dual Core Xeon 3085 - 29%.

Xeon 3085

If you are interested in official list have a look on Intel's corporate media list. I would find it more interesting if they list only CPU that have price changed.

Now it should be just a matter of time to see these in cheap(er) PC near you.

Fujitsu's 500 GB 2.5" hard disk announced

At the end of May Fujitsu will start selling notebook disk drives (2.5") with 500 GB capacity. This is the MGHZ2 BT series and it requires only 1.8 W of power with rotational speed of  4200 RPM and average seek time of 12 ms for read and 14 ms for write.

 

 

Let's hope it will not be too long before we see these available in New Zealand...

nVidia GeForce 9600 graphics card released

nVidia is very active on multiple fronts. On one hand it is very busy with porting Ageia's PhysX technology into it's own CUDA. Also they have released GeForce 9600 GT graphics card.

The cards are priced around USD $169-$189 and they are rivals with own 8800 GT cards.

Full article is available on the web site but interesting news are benchmarks done on this cards.  There are few articles discussing this but I was interested in Unreal Tournament III performance. Here is one example of the test impressions even if UT 3 is mentioned very briefly.

For technical details check Daily Tech page. Anyway here is a new card that bring out new technology attractive price. What I am really interested in is application of PhysX in GeForce cards. Let's wait and see how long it will take them to finish it off.