Sony’s PSP has suffered greatly thanks to an enthusiastic modding community that isn’t shy about ripping UMD games and distributing them digitally to anyone with a BitTorrent client and a “jailbroken” PSP. So now Sony is trying something new. This week it released SOCOM: U.S. Navy SEALs Fireteam Bravo 3 both digitally and on UMD. Both versions require online registration through the Playstation Network. SOCOM is primarily a multiplayer game so presumably most purchasers will have their PSPs online-ready; at first glance this system isn’t too big of a deal, at least for purchasers of the digital version.
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Research presented in a paper by Morgan McGuire, page
assistant professor of computer science at Williams College, nurse and co-author Dr. David Luebke of NVIDIA, human enhancement
introduces a new algorithm to improve computer graphics for video games.
McGuire and Luebke have developed a new method for computerizing lighting and light sources that will allow video game graphics to approach film quality.
Their paper “Hardware-Accelerated Global Illumination by Image Space Photon Mapping” won a Best Paper award at the 2009 Conference on High Performance Graphics.