July 2006

24 July

AMD acquires ATI

\"Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) has agreed to buy ATI Technologies Inc. (ATYT) for $5.4 billion in cash and stock. The transaction will let the No. 2 microprocessor maker expand into graphic chipsets used in high-end PCs, cell phones, and handheld devices. This will change the semiconductor industry by putting AMD on \"more equal footing\" with its fierce larger rival, Intel (INTC), said Samir Bhavnani, director of research at Current Analysis. \"It completes the puzzle for AMD,\" he said.\"

BlenderPocket v2.42 Released

BlenderPocket is an open source, handheld devices port of Blender 3D, the open-source software for 3D modeling, animation, rendering and playback. The new v2.42 is based on the new Blender 2.42 release and runs using the Rasteroid 3 OpenGL ES implementation (using a wrapper for any missing desktop OpenGL functions).

19 July

Khronos and ARB to merge

\"The new OpenGL Pipeline newsletter announces that the Khronos Group and OpenGL ARB plan to merge. The goal is to maximize synergy and accelerate adaptation to market demands. This will give the OpenGL ARB the opportunity to pursue advanced graphics capabilities that are being used in AEC, digital content creation, visual simulation, and science research, and OpenGL ES, the ability to distill OpenGL down to its essentials for mass-market and consumer applications - both APIs building on a common architectural foundation.\"

12 July

AmanithVG first tech preview released

\"AmanithVG is an implementation of OpenVG, the new application programming interface (API) for hardware accelerated 2D vector and raster graphics, created by the Khronos group. Differently from any other OpenVG implementation, AmanithVG is entirely built on top of OpenGL (from 1.1 to 2.0, using extensions where available) and OpenGL|ES (1.1 and 2.0) APIs. Thanks to these three pipelines, AmanithVG can grant high quality graphics on any kind of 3D chipset already available on the market, achieving tens of times faster performance than the better software rasterizers, especially in terms of full screen / high resolution animations and complex special effects (transparencies, fading, realtime rotoscaling and many others).\" An online video can be found here.

3 July

Flash Player 9 Released

\"Adobe officially released Flash Player 9 on 6/27. Windows and PowerPC Mac versions are currently available while Intel Mac and Linux versions are presumably forthcoming.\"

SDL 1.2.11 Released

\"SDL version 1.2.11 marks a minor bug fix release to the cross-platform multimedia library.\"

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