Welcome to Intel’s premier destination for Visual Computing. Whether your interest is 3D animation, video game development, digital media workflow and integration, or middleware innovations, you can find the information, resources, and opportunities you’re looking for right here. Bookmark us today, and unleash your Visual Adrenaline!

Featured Headlines

Meet Mr. Industrial

Meet Mr. Industrial

Justin Lassen is living the dream. As a pioneering digital musician, Lassen is well-connected and in high demand. He’s also demanding of himself and his PCs, because creating high-end audio requires tons of raw – and smart – compute power. Recently, Lassen upgraded to the Intel® Core™ i7 processor Extreme Edition. Read why he was blown away.

Using Intel® Laptop Gaming TDK in Game Application

Using Intel® Laptop Gaming TDK in Game Application

The Intel® Laptop Gaming TDK provides a set of APIs to help developers extend their games to the laptop. With platform-aware features and dynamic functionalities, developers can maximize gameplay on laptops and easily integrate network games into ad hoc networks. Get the overview, then download the TDK for free.

EA Sports Moves Graphics-Rich Gaming Online

EA Sports Moves Graphics-Rich Gaming Online

Golf games for the PC are about to experience a revolution: Online-only gameplay. EA Sport’s new game, Tiger Woods PGA TOUR Online, will be playable strictly through a browser. So the question: Will great gameplay be accessible on desktop, laptop, and MID platforms? The short answer is yes. With the help of Intel software engineers [PDF | 2.4 MB]

Product Brief: Intel® Core™ i5 Mobile Processor

Product Brief: Intel® Core™ i5 Mobile Processor

Learn how the Intel® Core™ i5 family of laptop processors can give you smart performance for an on-the-go lifestyle, whether at home or at work. Part of the Intel® Core™ Processor Family, the new Intel Core i5 mobile processor puts the power where you need it, thanks to Intel® Turbo Boost Technology. [PDF | 900 KB]

Product Brief: Intel® Core™ i5 Desktop Processor

Product Brief: Intel® Core™ i5 Desktop Processor

The Intel® Core™ i5 desktop processor with Intel® Graphics Technology allows for new levels of intelligent performance, advanced media and graphics features, and expanded business capabilities. Read how this feature-rich processor can get things done faster—all while being energy efficient. [PDF | 800 KB]

NASA Offers Gamers a Ride to Mars and Beyond

NASA Offers Gamers a Ride to Mars and Beyond

Although only a select group of individuals in the United States become astronauts, NASA is opening up space exploration to anyone with a PC. A NASA collective called Project Astronaut is developing an MMO game. The mission: explore the final frontier and find out what's possible - or might be.

Scaling Ambient Animations for Improved Game Experience

Scaling Ambient Animations for Improved Game Experience

Game developers want to deliver the best – and fairest – experience for each player. But in a multi-player situation, this poses a dilemma: How can gameplay be consistent across all computer platforms to ensure players on high-end systems don’t have an advantage? This article demonstrates one way to do it, using a free demo called Horsepower.

No Moving Parts: The Promise of Solid-State Drives

No Moving Parts: The Promise of Solid-State Drives

As a number of high-profile game developers are discovering, Intel® SATA Solid-State Drives move data swiftly, delivering massive volumes of input and output operations per second. The result: huge productivity boosts for programmers and blazingly fast load times for gamers.

Former Game Creator Taps Unreal Engine* 3 to Bring the World of Chadam to Life

Former Game Creator Taps Unreal Engine* 3 to Bring the World of Chadam to Life

Epic Games’ Unreal Engine* 3 is going to Hollywood, making a seamless crossover from linear to interactive entertainment through Chadam. Based on the paintings of California artist Alex Pardee, HDFilms is using the game engine to create a 10-episode Web series that will evolve into video games.

Hosted by Industry Veteran Steve Pitzel, Intel Software Network's New Artist and Animator Resources Area Invites Collaboration

Hosted by Industry Veteran Steve Pitzel, Intel Software Network's New Artist and Animator Resources Area Invites Collaboration

For digital artists, the hardware has finally caught up with the software, saving time and increasing the creative touches that make it into films and video games. Intel’s new Artist & Animator community lets artists collaborate on creating compelling digital art. Hosted by Steve Pitzel, former animation guru for RFX and Mattel. [1.3 MB | PDF]

Secrets of Multiplatform Data Baking

Secrets of Multiplatform Data Baking

Picking up from his past article, “Delicious Data Baking”, Noel Llopis delves into cross-platform game coding. From bools and ints to byte-endianness, Noel looks at how different target platforms treat data in memory and how to adjust your data baking so it's consistently usable, even with all those rules.

Fluid Simulation for Video Games – Part 1

Fluid Simulation for Video Games – Part 1

The simulation of real-world phenomena in video games allows game developers to create immersive virtual worlds. But until recently, most simulation has been limited to rigid bodies rather than fluid ones. In this article, Dr. Michael J. Gourlay begins a 3-part series that explains fluid dynamics and its simulation techniques.

Threaded Game Engine Helps Create New World In EA BioWare’s Dragon Age*: Origins

Threaded Game Engine Helps Create New World In EA BioWare’s Dragon Age*: Origins

Five years after the initial tease, the launch of Dragon Age: Origins is finally happening. Read how BioWare’s strategy of redefining development paradigms, engines, and processes paid off, maximizing the RPG for the multi-core world and generating market-building buzz.

Accelerate Your Media Apps Today (and Tomorrow) on Intel® Hardware article

Accelerate Your Media Apps Today (and Tomorrow) on Intel® Hardware article

For media developers, talking to the hardware correctly is hard work. But maybe no longer. The newly released Intel® Media SDK opens the doors to Intel® platforms to enable easier decoding, encoding, and video preprocessing. Read why early adopters are hailing it, CyberLink and Nero are using it, and where you can download it, free.

Resident Evil* 5 Takes Full Advantage of Intel® Core™ i7 Processors

Resident Evil* 5 Takes Full Advantage of Intel® Core™ i7 Processors

Resident Evil* has undergone a complete refresh to handle the increased horsepower of the Intel® Core™ i7 processor. Read how Capcom worked with Intel to harness the additional processing power and drove RE5 gameplay to new extremes on both desktop AND mobile systems.

Total War: The Return of Operation Flashpoint*

Total War: The Return of Operation Flashpoint*

Gaming hardware – and geopolitical power – are always in flux. Case in point: Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising*. For the game, the focus is oil and natural resources. For the developers, the focus is multiple cores, wicked-fast frame rates, and mobility. Read how Codemasters and Intel made it happen.

Becoming More Godlike: How Demigod* Appeased the Masses with Intel® Graphics Performance Analyzers

Becoming More Godlike: How Demigod* Appeased the Masses with Intel® Graphics Performance Analyzers

With millions of potential gamers running their systems on Intel® Graphics chipsets, game developers are reaching this huge audience segment by tuning their games for integrated graphics. Gas Powered Games is one of those developers. Read how they spun the dials on Demigod and achieved optimum play performance on Intel Graphics chipsets.

Archive

Technology Focus

Intel® Threading Building Blocks: Ready for Non-Uniform Memory Access Platforms

Intel® Threading Building Blocks: Ready for Non-Uniform Memory Access Platforms

Maintaining performance between hardware and software is a challenge. But Intel® Threading Building Blocks can make it easier, particularly for non-uniform memory access (NUMA) platforms, including the Intel® Nehalem platform. Learn the challenges and performance gains of NUMA platforms over symmetric multiprocessor platforms.

Debugging Threaded Applications

Debugging Threaded Applications

Parallel programming has a reputation for being difficult because, well … it is. Multiple execution threads must be run in parallel, and every thread has to have an effect on at least one other thread. What could possibly go wrong? This article examines where threading defects lurk, how to find them, and – better yet – how to avoid them.

Fluid Simulation for Video Games (Part 2)

Fluid Simulation for Video Games (Part 2)

Continuing from Part 1, Dr. Michael J. Gourlay begins delving into the equations that define the motion of fluids (non-linear PDE's combined with initial and boundary value constraints). He then offers numerical techniques to simulate fluid motion, as well as ways to parallelize numerical codes for multi-core hardware.

Procedural Trees and Procedural Fire in a Virtual World

Procedural Trees and Procedural Fire in a Virtual World

This white paper demonstrates a technique for realistically animating a forest fire. It describes the creation and implementation of the grammar and parser used to create the trees, and examines the Fire System which uses the Smart Particle Engine to set the trees ablaze. [6.8 MB | PDF]

Who Moved the Goalposts? The Rapidly Changing World of CPUs

Who Moved the Goalposts? The Rapidly Changing World of CPUs

Developing a game can be like trying to build something on quicksand: The landscape you’re developing for keeps shifting. With a focus on the Intel® Core™ i7 processor, this white paper helps developers navigate the complex landscape of processor architecture, system performance, and application scalability.

OMG, Multi-threading is Easier than Networking

OMG, Multi-threading is Easier than Networking

Question: Why should developers put up with the challenges that come with threading an application? Orion Granatir, former Insomniac Games engineer and senior engineer for Intel visual computing, answers that question (hint: threading unlocks the power of the CPU) and uses network programming to explain threading basics. Comes with code samples.

Archive

Recent Downloads

icon

Intel® Media SDK

icon

Intel® Threading Analysis Tools for HPC

icon

Blog Post: Why Develop Games for Atom?

icon

Intel® Laptop Gaming TDK

icon

Havok physics and animation middleware for PCs

icon

Getting the Most out of Intel® Extreme Graphics Sample Code

icon

Intel® Architecture Code Analyzer

icon

Intel® Parallel Studio

icon

Smoke Game Technology Demo

icon

Quick Reference Guide to Intel® Integrated Graphics

icon

Visual Adrenaline with Intel: Intel® Core™ i7 Processor Microsite