Backing up DVDs is an important topic for many people. Transferring the DVD to a portable format isn’t easy though and can take a lot of time. My daughter is away this weekend and I thought it would be nice for her to be able to watch some of her DVDs on her PC while she’s away. Her netbook, tablet and smartphone don’t have DVD drives (although the netbook has a DVD playback license) so there’s only one thing possible – transfer them to a portable digital format. I’ve tested three generations of Ultrabook with a very simple DVD backup process and the results are below.

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Intel Iris and Intel Iris Pro have just been announced as the new brands for the top two tiers of Intel’s 4th-gen Core processor (Haswell) graphics. Iris will appear in Ultrabooks but, surprisingly, only on a 28W TDP processor. It indicates that there are some higher-level processing options coming to Ultrabooks. Other 4th-gen Core processors for Ultrabooks get HD 5000 graphics.

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On target for a launch around the Computex (June) timeframe the 4th generation Core processor, Haswell, is now shipping to OEMs. Intel announced the status at the Developer Forum keynote in Beijing and took the time to re-promote some of the features we already know about. A new Toshiba hybrid Ultrabook was shown on stage and WiDi got a push too.

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Haswell reference design shown at GDC 2013

At GDC 2013, Intel announced that their next-gen Haswell graphics will support a new bit of tech called PixelSync as well as DirectX 11.1. PixelSync on Hawell graphics enables two rendering techniques called ASVM and AOIT which can cost a standard GPU up to 80% of it’s performance but runs smoothly with Haswell’s integrated graphics. The developers behind Grid 2 are using Haswell’s new tech to bring graphically rich games to the masses.

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