Software : Google and Audi set to team up on Android-based in-car infotainment systems

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• Google and Audi set to team up on Android-based in-car infotainment systems
• In Depth: In the pursuit of FPS: how AMD and Nvidia are tackling PC gaming optimization
• Roundup: Best BitTorrent clients for Mac: 6 reviewed and rated

Google and Audi set to team up on Android-based in-car infotainment systems Posted: Google and high-end German auto manufacturer Audi are preparing to announce they're working together to produce a new generation of Android-based in-car systems. The partnership, set to be officially confirmed at the CES expo in early January, involves the creation of dedicated, built-in hardware, running on Google's mobile operating system. According to the Wall Street Journal's report, the units will give drivers access to some of the same navigation, entertainment and information tools that they enjoy on their smartphones and tablets. The article says Google and Audi will be joined in the venture by chip manufacturer Nvidia with the parties using CES to announce a timetable for Android-based systems to arrive in cars within 4 to 5 years. iOS vs Android pt. 5,526 The news comes as Apple prepares for its own march on in-car connectivity. Earlier this year it announced its own iOS in the Car initiative, which will allow iPhones and iPads to play nice with compatible vehicles. A recent iOS 7.1 beta provided evidence that iOS in the Car will be integrated within the update, which will land at a time yet to be determined. It seems that Apple and Google have found yet another ripe territory to battle over. Who'll come out on top this time? Would you rather have Apple Maps or Google Maps built into your motor? In depth: What does iOS in the Car mean for in-car multimedia?

In Depth: In the pursuit of FPS: how AMD and Nvidia are tackling PC gaming optimization Posted: Over the last few years PC gaming has become significantly more approachable to the everyday gamer, thanks to a combination of more affordable hardware and the availability of discounted digital game libraries through places like Steam and Green Man Gaming. While the price has gone down for both PC hardware and titles, more recently Nvidia and AMD have tried to alleviate even more gamer headaches with optimization software. To this end, Nvidia opened its GeForce Experience beta to the public in January, and AMD launched its Raptr-powered Gaming Evolved application in September. On the surface, the two applications almost seem cut from the same cloth. Both simplify the process of downloading new graphics card drivers to a one-click software update. Similarly, the software packages also set all your graphics settings following some basic guidelines that prioritize a faster frame rate or greater visual fidelity. Continuing the similarities, the pair of apps were developed with the explicit purpose to help fine tune visual settings for less tech savvy gamers. After all, not everyone knows the difference between tessellation (the splitting of polygons) and ambient occlusion (the way light radiates and reflects) to save their overheating GPU as the FPS craters. While the two apps are much the same in nature and purpose, that's where their commonalities end. We recently spoke with Nvidia and Raptr, the online gaming partner that powers AMD's Gaming Evolved app, to uncover how each are figuring out PC optimization and what they might have in store for the gaming masses in the future. The numbers game Raptr is a 7-year old game tracking service that helps users keep tabs on how long they've been playing games. Beyond clocking hours it's also an online community site that ties together users' Xbox, PlayStation Network, and PC gaming accounts for those achievement/trophy obsessed. Raptr CEO Dennis Fong explained that although the optimization piece is new to his company's offerings, it's not actually that much further than what Raptr was already doing. The company itself tracks over 2,000 computer games with more than 20 million users. It also uses technology that can tell whether gamers were playing a single or multiplayer title, what games they've installed and what hardware makes up their rigs. In a micro-sized version of the Raptr service, AMD's Gaming Evolved pulls crowdsourced data from a user base edging over one million. "The way we designed the system is we actually know what types of [PC hardware] configurations people are using," Fong explained. "We know what frame rates they are actually getting and we capture all that data every single time you play." He continued: "Every single time you play, it records a FPS histogram of your game session. We can tell if you're playing a single player or multiplayer session. When we record these FPS histograms, there's a lot of noise; as an example if you're watching a cut scene that frame rate is capped, so we sort that out." These cleaned-up histograms are then churned into Raptr's machine learning system, which crunches all the data. The system is designed to zone in on PC gaming experts who get the optimal performance while using high-quality visual settings. Using an example of expert users who turned off tessellation Fong explained, "what we're seeing a big boost in performance while the rest of the high quality settings are extremely high. Once our machine learns that, it then rolls that [recommendation] out to everyone else. " "What we're trying to do is find experts," he went on. "The gamers out there that go to all the tech sites and tweak their settings. The beauty of our system is we capture all of that knowledge automatically." The human touch In a similar approach, Nvidia also leverages the expertise of hardcore PC gamers, except it uses real-life people in its testing labs around the world. James Wang, GeForce Experience product manager, was happy to tell us that Nvidia does its optimization work in-house with labs in Moscow, Santa Clara, Calif. and Shenzhen, China. Each lab employs a team of expert testers to figure out which settings are most important and contribute the greatest to the gameplay experience, all the while leaving out those that simply eat up performance. "We figured it out pretty early that you can't just run scripts and not have anyone look at it because in the end, when you say to people [that] we recommend these settings are the best, that really requires a subjective call," Wang expounded. "For example, if anti-aliasing or texture quality is more important in a game, a computer can't tell you which one is more preferable." To do this, Nvidia uses an optimization that tests different combinations of CPU and GPU hardware. While Nvidia doesn't test every single CPU release, Wang was quick to note that every GPU released by Nvidia is covered. Plus, the team constructs a performance index of all Nvidia's GPUs on the market today. This drawn-up list of recommendations is fed into Nvidia's own algorithm and loaded onto a server of different PC part setups. From there the lab team takes the priority list and figures out how to turn on as many graphics settings as possible. No perfect system Both Nvidia and AMD have developed similar systems using two different approaches, but each has its own set of flaws. Wang specifically criticized AMD and Raptr's crowdsourced approach as a privacy risk as well as being ineffective. "If we just did pure data mining from the users, it's a lot of data being mined and not everyone is comfortable with that," Wang broached. "The other thing is that when you mine the common case, the average answer is not necessarily the correct answer." These privacy issues were misconceptions that Fong addressed by explicitly saying, "all of this data is used exclusively for optimization. We don't sell any user data [belonging to] individuals or otherwise, it's just to make the optimizations better." He elaborated that "when a lot of people think about crowd sourcing, then they think whatever is popular, but that does not really work in this particular case because popular is the lowest common denominator of default settings." Nvidia, meanwhile, has a system that arguably cannot account for every possible PC configuration out there. Wang contended that "the dominant performance impacting parts are the GPU, CPU and of course the resolution of the monitor." "The more important number [to gamers] - is their PC covered?" he posed. "We cover pretty much all the CPUs today and all of our GPUs, both desktop and notebook." In the future, Wang and Fong each told us to expect more games to make it under their respective optimization trees. Currently Gaming Evolved serves 65 games with roughly seven being added every week, while GeForce Experience supports 130 games since starting with a meager 30-plus titles. Features on the horizon Beyond optimization Nvidia and AMD have implemented other features for the streaming and YouTube gaming communities. The Nvidia GeForce Experience app brought a built-in game capture tool called ShadowPlay, which allows gamers to record and upload their own gameplay using only their graphics card. Gaming Evolved, on the other hand, implements an easy way for users to start streaming their games on Twitch. Nvidia also recently added Twitch integration. Both Wang and Fong agreed that the emergence of YouTube and eSports have taken off as a huge part of the gaming community, but just like optimization, Nvidia and AMD have adopted different approaches to game capture and streaming features. Whereas Nvidia does more work behind the scenes, AMD utilizes an overlay that goes on top of full-screen games to give gamers access to their web browser without having to Alt-Tab. Looking towards the future, Wang teased that Nvidia's ability to stream games through its graphics cards beyond using just the Nvidia Shield. "We haven't talked about that right now, but the core technology of streaming does not require the end point has to be a Shield," Wang said. "It is possible that you can stream to another device but we haven't announced any direction to go there." For AMD, Fong said that Raptr wants to implement more tools into its screen overlay, but we'll hear more about this as we head into January along with more announcements at CES 2014. We uncover the story behind Apple's unofficial mascot John Appleseed.

Roundup: Best BitTorrent clients for Mac: 6 reviewed and rated Posted: When most people hear the word 'BitTorrent', they don't tend to think 'Ah, yes, that indubitably fine way to download legitimate files'. Since its creation, though, the often-naughty protocol has been just as useful for legal file transfer, such as handling the grunt work in tools like Blizzard's World of Warcraft updater, and for letting creators share movies and games and other large files without having to foot a crippling bill. BitTorrent's creators are also experimenting with 'bundle' content, with over 18 million legit downloads already clocked and a new publishing platform on the way. Obviously, this is the only kind of content you will be downloading. While the basic job of any BitTorrent client is pretty simple - click a torrent, sit back and wait - the apps we'll be looking at all put a very different spin on things. Tools range from open source to commercial products, from light apps that simply do their job to comprehensive media suites. But which one is best for you? Malware and more: Careful when you click BitTorrent clients don't have the greatest reputation, and while it's not as deserved on the Mac as on other platforms, they remain a bad type of product to simply download and give a shot. Even the legitimate ones routinely try to sneak toolbars and homepage changes past you through their installers, and every big update can be a new chance for them to give it a shot. In most cases these can be fixed with a sigh and a trip to your browsers' extensions menu, but it's still a nuisance and you're always left with the possibility of something quieter lurking around. Before downloading any, it's worth doing a quick search of the name plus key terms like 'spyware' just to be on the safe side. A number of clients are 'open source' - in other words, you can download the code behind them. Despite what some people think, this doesn't guarantee a lack of naughtiness, but it does help. Also, only ever download your clients from official sites/links, and make sure you're on the right one. Scammers aren't above repackaging clients and passing them off as the real deal, or picking up website addresses that look official until it's too late. On test BitRocket BitTorrent Tomato Transmission Vuze XTorrent Test one: The basics For when you just want that file now Almost all of these apps do a fine job out of the box, with download speeds based more on the number of users accessing the file than anything else. Xtorrent is the exception; its free version caps downloads at 100kb/s after a few minutes and nags you for $25. With free alternatives and a lack of unique features, this is a tough sell. BitTorrent Plus is PC only. Vuze Plus adds antivirus for $19 a year. All the apps offer a way to control how much uploading you do. BitTorrent (and uTorrent, which is very closely related) offers transfer capping. BitTorrent, Transmission, and Xtorrent offer the option to easily change limits automatically between set times, but vary on whether they treat it as a speed limiter or lifting normal restrictions. Vuze offers this too, but configured by an oddly clumsy text file. After a download finishes, most clients prefer to keep seeding, and all offer controls for that - Tomato is the most comprehensive, offering a percentage, a maximum amount of data, or a set period of time. Test two: Advanced options Which client is best for power users? Aside from Xtorrent, these apps can create torrents as well as download them - a process that's as easy as picking a file or a folder and optionally pointing the resulting torrent file to a tracker. That's where Tomato calls it a day, followed by BitRocket. BitTorrent and Transmission support remote access through a web browser, though for the latter you need a static IP address. BitTorrent offers a service that simply works across the internet. BitTorrent, Vuze and BitRocket all include feed support, allowing new torrents to be added through RSS. Xtorrent and Vuze can also add downloaded media files straight to iTunes, with Vuze handling transcoding duties using a free plugin. Vuze also offers by far the most options to tweak and play with, thankfully filtered based on a User Proficiency option that goes from Beginner to Advanced. The advanced options include DNS, IP filtering, local RSS and much more, covering everything you're likely to need to twiddle with and more. Test three: System load For when you've got it on all the time The good news is none of these apps should noticeably affect a Mac's performance. We set all of them to simultaneously download a hefty Linux distribution on our test MacBook Air. On the CPU side, Xtorrent immediately declared itself king of the fatties by swallowing 21.5% of CPU time to Vuze's 12.1%, with the others barely even registering a blip. Vuze went to town on RAM, however, gulping down 330.6MB compared to Xtorrent's 95MB. Sveltest by far was Tomato, clocking in at around 17MB of memory and just 1.4% CPU usage. We also ran Xtorrent on its own; it began at just 10% CPU usage, but quickly shot up to 20 and then 30%, though its memory usage was far lower, at only 113.2MB. At rest, Vuze was the most CPU and memory draining, at 10% and around 300MB respectively, Xtorrent joining the others at the lower end of the scale. In short, whichever you choose should be fine, but for the lowest-impact torrenting, you can't beat Tomato. Test four: Finding content Of the legal kind, obviously Most of the time, torrents are found outside the client, and Transmission, BitRocket and Tomato are happy to leave it there. Oddly, so is BitTorrent, with its official content only available through a web browser - at least for now. Vuze, meanwhile, has embraced online content, with a stack of free trailers, online shows and other freebies. Don't get too excited when you see shows like The Wire though; click through and you get behind-the-scenes documentaries and recaps rather than full episodes. Vuze also promises a search, though it defaults to simply searching the web like normal. A second tab provides access to a more focussed metasearch, which goes for legitimate sites like Internet Archive and its own collection rather than (ahem) 'others', though (ahem) 'others' can be added. Xtorrent, however, provides by far the best search, grouping results within the interface and breaking them down by site, size and swarm quality. The winner: BitTorrent BitTorrent (and by extension, uTorrent), hits a great middle ground for torrenting apps. It doesn't have as many features as Vuze and it's a little heavier than Transmission or Tomato, but it ticks all the necessary boxes, doesn't crash as much as BitRocket did, and has a couple of very handy features - not least that setting it up to work over the internet couldn't be easier. The scheduler means large downloads can adapt to you rather than manually stopping and starting the process, and being able to specify a transfer cap for a given period is fantastic for anyone on a capped connection. Actually putting its money where BitTorrent's corporate mouth is - with more direct access to legal content - wouldn't hurt, but if you know where to look, this is all you need. Now why not read Apple iWatch release date, news and rumours?

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