Recently, Splashtop® announced that their Splashtop Streamer application is now optimized for select AMD Radeon™ GPUs and APUs, allowing users to stream content, such as games and videos, from  their AMD-powered desktop PCs with super low latency.

 Splashtop® Streamer is the ultimate remote desktop application for your PC, allowing you stream your Windows desktop to a variety of mobile devices running Windows, Android and iOS. You can remotely access your AMD-powered desktop PC from your notebook, tablet or phone so you can stay in the zone, virtually whenever and wherever. And of course, when you are connected to the same local area network as your PC, you can stream your favorite PC game to your mobile device and experience high quality graphics.For a limited time, we are excited to announce a FREE bonus offer for the Splashtop® Remote Desktop Application to activate the configurable shortcuts and virtual joystick  (in-application add-ons). This is being offered as a bonus, opt-in option within the Never Settle Forever program when you purchase an eligible AMD Radeon™ graphics.

 With our promo code for the configurable shortcuts and virtual joystick, you’ll enable configurable on-screen shortcuts for Microsoft Office apps, games, media players, browsing, file navigation and more. And with the virtual joystick (e.g. configurable game pad), you can transform your touch-driven tablet or phone into a portable remote gaming machine. This promotion code will also be bundled with select AMD A-Series APUs at a later date. See www.amd.com/neversettlefoeveroffer for more details.

 Participants will have access to this service for a period of three months, from the time of activation. After three months, users can continue to continue paying Splashtop for the service, or use the Splashtop® Remote Desktop Application free of charge without the configurable shortcuts and virtual joystick.

We’re excited for this collaboration with Splashtop and hope you are too. Which desktop PC tasks are you most looking forward to bringing with you on-the-go?

 AMD Radeon™ Sky cloud gaming cards and AMD RapidFire technology enable Leap Computing to deliver a fully-realized, turnkey cloud solution for uncompromising performance on games like Battlefield 4, Dirt 3 and Tomb Raider. As a bonus, it’s also a cost-effective option for video game developers.

 While at the show I presented a session entitled “RapidFire: The Easy Route To Low Latency Cloud Gaming Solutions”. This was an opportunity for attendees to learn more about how AMD's RapidFire SDK simplifies the delivery of multi-game streaming from a single GPU while working to minimize latency to ensure one of the best cloud gaming experiences.

 At the AMD exhibit, the AMD RapidFire and Leap Computing streaming gameplay demonstration generated a great deal of interest and inquiries by showcasing the next major step in cloud gaming that allowed attendees to play popular titles via streamed content on laptops.

 “Although these technologies have existed for the past several years, the play experience has been too resource-heavy to actually make cloud deployment possible, until now,” said Alexander Nataros, chief executive officer at Leap Computing. “The performance and precision of the AMD Radeon Sky cloud gaming GPUs have been instrumental in optimizing hardware for our service. AMD has positioned itself as an industry leader in the emerging cloud graphics space through both the AMD RapidFire technology API and its Direct Output Post Processing (D.O.P.P.) support. With these tools, Leap Computing has been able to provide a graphically intense, low-latency environment that would not have been otherwise possible.”

 AMD Radeon™ Sky Series products support up to six HD game streams at once(1). Furthermore, service providers can maximize existing infrastructure and resources to support even more simultaneous streams, from casual games up to the most demanding AAA titles. AMD Radeon Sky Series products are designed to support a wide range of servers and systems.

 Additionally, AMD RapidFire technology enables cloud gaming partners to benefit from an open API, simplifying manipulation of key hardware controls to provide HD visual quality, minimal latency and optimal network bandwidth, resulting in a compelling and responsive experience on virtually any device. In line with AMD’s commitment to industry standard APIs, like OpenCL™, DirectX® and OpenGL, an open standard API for cloud gaming can help align the industry around one platform and drive continued innovations.
For more information on AMD FirePro graphics solutions, visit: www.fireprographics.com

 Allen Bourgoyne is the director of ISV Alliances for Professional Graphics at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

 (1)  Test conducted at AMD measuring the ability of a Colfax CX 1250-N4 1U rack mount server with Ciinow Cumulus Cloud Services version 2.0 running on an AMD Opteron™ 6380 16 core Server processor with one AMD Radeon Sky Series model 700, 32GB RAM, video driver 12.10.17.1 to stream to games simultaneously. At 60 fps and 720p resolution, 3 streams were achieved; at 30fps and 720p, 6 streams were achieved. 3 games: LEGO® Batman™, Harry Potter™ Years 1-4, and Devil May Cry; 6 games: Trine, LEGO® Batman™, LEGO® Harry Potter™ Years 1-4 and Years 507, Far Cry 3, CardBoard Castle. FP-77

 OpenCL and the OpenCL logo are trademarks of Apple Inc. used by permission by Khronos.

 Let’s take a look at both technologies to see how the AMD Catalyst 14.3 Beta driver makes the Thief experience even better for you!

 A BRIEF PRIMER ON AMD TRUEAUDIO TECHNOLOGYAMD TrueAudio technology is a hardware-level feature found on the AMD Radeon™ R9 290X, R9 290, R7 260X and R7 260 graphics cards. A small block of audio processing hardware is integrated directly into the graphics chips in these products. That audio processing hardware is called a “Digital Signal Processor,” or DSP.A DSP is specialized silicon dedicated to the task of processing—you guessed it—digital signals. Example applications for a DSP include: audio compression, audio filtering, speech processing and recognition, simulating audio environments, creating 3D sound fields and more.

 DSPs are fully programmable, which allows developers to creatively harness that hardware in ways limited only by their imagination and skill. We are striving with AMD TrueAudio to give game developers a blank canvas for new and never-before-heard audio environments and techniques. Fully programmable hardware was inspired by another pivotal moment in our history, when we helped transition the industry to programmable graphics chips in the mid-2000s—game art has been breathtakingly diverse ever since!

 To enable this rich climate of imagination, we turned to Cadence IP and their portfolio of Tensilica Xtensa series DSPs. We licensed their technology to equip each AMD TrueAudio-capable graphics card with a trio of Xtensa HiFi EP (PDF) cores. Together, these three DSPs allow game developers to fully offload their game audio environment from the processor to our GPU.Full offloading of a game’s audio engine is a key benefit of AMD TrueAudio technology. The hardware horsepower we provide to audio processing with the integrated DSPs is tremendous compared to the horsepower typically given to processor-based audio engines. In other words, audio engineers have historically received a very small portion of a processor’s overall performance to run their audio engines—one can only imagine how much this has stifled game audio innovation over the years! While it’s difficult to predict all the creative ways developers will take advantage of this new and powerful hardware, a wise man once said: “if you build it, they will come.”On a final note, we wanted to impress that AMD TrueAudio technology is compatible with any audio hardware you already own. AMD TrueAudio enters the audio chain at the application level, long before sound ever reaches your audio chip or audio endpoint (e.g. headphones). Whether you have integrated audio on the motherboard, a discrete sound card, or a standalone USB headset, AMD TrueAudio is already part and parcel of the audio stream that’s being fed to these devices by the game’s audio engine. And because it operates at the application level, AMD TrueAudio is fully aware of the game’s positional and environmental data. AMD TrueAudio technology is intrinsically able to provide audio data that fully reflects the game’s goings on.

 For even more technical information on AMD TrueAudio technology, we encourage you to visit this MaximumPC interview with Carl Wakeland, the brains behind AMD TrueAudio technology at AMD.

 AMD TRUEAUDIO IN THIEFWith respect to Thief, AMD TrueAudio is utilized to calculate an effect called “convolution reverb.” Convolution reverb is a technique that mathematically simulates the echoes (i.e. reverberation) of a real-life location. This effect is accomplished by recording an “impulse response,” which is a snapshot of the echo characteristics of a real-world location. That impulse response is fed back into software that can recreate that behavior in a PC game.Thief uses this technique to make buildings, cathedrals, alleyways and other in-game venues sound quite like they would in real life! In an environment where there are adjacent areas with different echo characteristics and impulse response (example: a cathedral adjacent to a cave and an open space), multiple convolution reverbs must be processed in parallel to create the most realistic sound environment. AMD worked closely with Eidos to process up to four convolution reverbs simultaneously with AMD TrueAudio technology, and you should try mission seven to get the best experience!

 AMD TRUEAUDIO ELSEWHEREIn addition to Thief, today we will also release an AMD TrueAudio-enabled demo prepared by GenAudio and FMOD for the Occulus Rift. If you have one in your home, now would be a great time to break it out. If not, you can still experience the demo for yourself, but the graphics will be displayed as a stereo pair.

 In this demo, called Tuscanny, AMD TrueAudio is utilized to calculate the spatialization of an audio environment. Spatialization is a technique that permits the audio engine to create a fully 3D soundfield on a stereo headset. This effect is powered by AstoundSound 3D RTI plugin by GenAudio, and it includes support for elevation, distance and positioning. Please watch this page for the download to become available.

 A BRIEF PRIMER ON MANTLEMantle has been many years in the making by AMD, but we were not alone in this effort! Mantle was also directly shaped by the input we received from the greater game development community that has long sought a low-level graphics API for PCs.  We worked shoulder-to-shoulder with developers like Eidos Montreal to create Mantle in the image of their needs: a streamlined, robust, efficient API for modern graphics work. In fact, Mantle is the very first lower level API designed with input from game developers for their modern craft!

 At the simplest level, Mantle is an Application Programming Interface (API), or a language that game developers can use to write code that creates the beautiful graphics on your screen. In its current iteration, the Mantle API uniquely leverages the hardware in the Graphics Core Next architecture (GCN) of modern AMD Radeon™ GPUs for peak performance.

 More broadly, Mantle is functionally similar to DirectX® and OpenGL, but Mantle is different in that it was purpose-built as a lower level API. By “lower level,” it’s meant that the language of Mantle more closely matches the way modern graphics architectures (like AMD’s own GCN) are designed to execute code. The primary benefit of a lower level API is a reduction in software bottlenecks, such as the time a GPU and CPU must spend translating/understanding/reorganizing code on-the-fly before it can be executed and presented to the user as graphics. Mantle comes in contrast to the “high level API,” which offers broader compatibility with multiple GPU architectures, but does so at the expense of lower performance and efficiency.

 For more information on the design goals of Mantle, we encourage you to visit the “Four Core Principles of Mantle” blog.

 MANTLE GRAPHICS API IN THIEFIn Thief, Mantle is utilized to improve the graphics performance of many common PC configurations at a resolution of 1080p. Let’s look at the performance impact Mantle is making for systems like these.First up, an entry-level gaming system based on the CPU in the new AMD A10-7700K APU (the on die GPU is disabled) and an AMD Radeon™ R7 260X graphics card. This is a sensible CPU/GPU combination that sees up to 23% more performance when Mantle is enabled in Thief. Even more importantly for these gamers, the “High Quality” graphics preset offers playable framerates with Mantle enabled! The data is clear: users with this class of system would have to opt for lower image quality if it weren’t for Mantle’s performance improvements.Next we’ll look at a mid/high-end gaming system based on the AMD FX-8350 and an AMD Radeon™ R9 280X graphics card. These users are already playing on the game’s highest graphics settings, but with Mantle they can do that with up to 19% higher framerates.We even make the experience better for customers with an AMD Radeon-based Intel system. Below is another high-end gaming system based on the Intel Core i5-4670K and the AMD Radeon™ R9 290X Graphics. Gamers with a configuration like this could see up to 17% additional performance at 1080p!As you can see, Mantle is making a substantial difference for a huge cross-section of the buying public that plays their games at 1080p with very affordable CPU/GPU combinations. In some cases, Mantle is even granting gamers access to previously-unplayable graphics quality! We’re very pleased that our new, young graphics API is already having such a big effect for so many people.

 RESOURCES FOR YOU

• Download the AMD Catalyst™ 14.3 Beta driver
• Learn more about Mantle
• Read our blogs about Mantle
• Learn more about AMD TrueAudio technology
• Read the interview with AMD TrueAudio technology’s creator
• Buy Thief on Steam™

 Robert Hallock is PR Manager for Gaming & Desktop Graphics at AMD.  His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites, and references to third party trademarks, are provided for convenience and illustrative purposes only.  Unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links, and no third party endorsement of AMD or any of its products is implied.
Correction Notice: The original edition of this blog reported that AMD TrueAudio technology utilized a HiFi 2 core in conjunction with three HiFi EP cores. The correct total is three HiFi EP cores and no HiFi 2 cores.

 It’s estimated that roughly 300 million PCs will be sold worldwide this year¹ and if you’re one of the lucky people buying one you’ve got a big decision to make. As you search for the best PC for you, you’ll likely do a combination of researching and comparing products online (possibly Googling unknown tech words and dropping them casually into conversation with friends later), talking to that tech-obsessed friend we all have that seems to know all the latest and greatest gadgets, visiting stores to have a look at what the products actually look like, and polling your social networks to weigh in with their opinions and experiences.

 However, by thinking through five key choices first you could save yourself a lot of time and energy, not to mention heartache over a wrong decision.

 #1: Choose a Computer type. There’s never been more choice when it comes to the type of computer you can get, which is both really awesome and pretty intimidating. If you don’t already know what you’re looking for - a desktop or All-in-One, a laptop, a tablet, or perhaps a 2-in-1 - start by asking yourself:

• Who will use the computer? Just you, a roommate, kids?
• How will it be used? Email, watching videos/TV, creating presentations or other documents, editing photos/videos, connecting with friends and family through social media and video chats
• Where will it be used? At home in a stationary place so everyone can share, around the home, out-and-about town, on business trips?

 #2: Settle on a budget. Figure out how much you want to spend and do your best to stick to it. You may be surprised at how far your money will go these days to get you a computer that you love and meets all your needs.

 #3: Pick a processor. You may think this category is a little biased given I work at a chip company, but the processor really is one of the most important pieces that makes up your computer. You can learn more about why in our “How To Choose the Right Processor” Infographic, which also describes different types of processors and the significant advancements in this area since the first central processing unit (CPU) was introduced in 1978. These advancements were driven by the way you and I use our technology today, resulting in a new category of processor known as the accelerated processing unit (APU) that’s designed for today’s most popular computing activities. So, why choose a decades-old technology that’s been gradually updated to fit into today’s world for your brand new computer? After all, would you trade in your favorite online gaming app or game console for a Simon game (also introduced in 1978)?! I think not.

 #4: Figure out your features. The real key here is knowing what you want to do on your computer (for example, are you a gamer? Do you do a lot of photo and/or video editing?). This will help you figure out what features are most important to you. Some of the major decisions include:

• Screen size - There are many choices here with benefits and trade-offs for each. Generally, if you’re looking at a desktop you can go big as long as it fits in the designated space.
• Touchscreen or no touchscreen - Touch is a really cool new way to interface with your computer, but it’s not for everyone and often increases the cost of the computer. For mobile computing, smaller screen size usually means smaller keyboard, but lighter/more portable. Larger screens are less tote-able, but provide more surface area from which to enjoy your videos.
• Integrated webcam - Particularly useful for anyone away from loved ones regularly, or those who work remotely, also a key component for new user interfaces like AMD Gesture Control and AMD Face Login.
• Connectivity - How many USB ports do you need? Do you need an HDMI port? A VGA port to connect to projectors at work? A CD-ROM drive? Caution: failure to outline these needs now can lead to toting around a lot of dongles in the future!
• Battery life - If you’re set on a laptop or tablet you’ll need to decide on your battery life requirements. For mainly around the house use you’ll have ready access to a power source - the same usually goes for the office. If you’re constantly on the go, you’ll want to look at a more power efficient solution, perhaps one based on one of those AMD APUs you heard about in #3, which are designed to be energy efficient.
• Storage options - It’s likely that any computer you choose today will have sufficient RAM (for the temporary stuff that disappears when you turn your computer off), however the hard drive options (for the files, applications, and data that’s still on your computer when you log back on) are where it gets a little more complex. Some key advantages and disadvantages of the two most popular hard drive options are:
  • Hard-disk drives (or HDDs) A good choice for those who do typical computing activities like email, Web surfing, basic content creation and editing, as well as for those with large multimedia collections or who work with large files.
    • Key Advantages: Less expensive and available in a variety of capacities up to multi-Terabyte options.
    • Drawbacks: Larger in size and thus the computers they come in are typically bigger. HDDs are also known to be generally slower and less stable than the other popular option discussed below.
  • Solid-state drives (or SSDs) Might be right for you if you’re constantly on the go, have an extreme need for speed, or perhaps just have some extra money to burn.
    • Key advantages: Durability and fast performance that help lead to quick boot times and app loading, among other things.
    • Drawbacks: More expensive, usually less storage capacity than their HDD brothers

Or, you could go for a combination of SSD and HDD with a Hybrid drive or dual-drive system, which combine the above options either internally or externally to get the advantages of both.

 #5: Consider where to buy. Whereas you’ll likely do most of your research online, you may want to go into an actual store (gasp!) to make your purchase. The savvy shopper you are, you’ll surely do your due diligence to research and compare prices with retailers and e-tailers to make sure you get the best deal.

 Once you have these five items figured out, you have a list that you can reference during your search for the best new computer for you. I wish you happy hunting! And don’t forget to visit AMD.com to learn more about the latest AMD-based computers and AMD processors, and how AMD designs technology that powers millions of intelligent devices, including personal computers, tablets, game consoles and cloud servers that define the new era of surround computing.

 Sarah Youngbauer is a PR Manager at AMD. Her postings are her own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites, and references to third party trademarks, are provided for convenience and illustrative purposes only. Unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links, and no third party endorsement of AMD or any of its products is implied.