Geforce GTX 295 Preview

The guys at Guru 3D have previewed the new Geforce GTX 295!

No matter what game you'll play with the GeForce GTX 295, you'll play it at dazzling framerates, very high resolutions and the very best in image quality. We have shown you the performance of some pretty hot titles. Surely Left 4 Dead based on the HL-2 source engine is a pretty easy task for any modern graphics card, but the card scaled just so well. And when we look at Far Cry 2, we see more of the pretty jawbreaking performance. The same goes for Call of Duty World at War and obviously the other titles we tested. You will not have to forfeit on image quality settings and you can play in the highest resolutions. But that is of course expected. Also and I do have to mention this, the GTX 295 will be a graphics card for users with a high resolution monitor. The overall performance really starts to kick in after roughly 1920x1200, a resolution where more and more pixels need to be rendered and where GPU limitation normally kicks in pretty fast... So keep in mind that cards like these really start to show off in the higher resolutions.

Click here for the full preview.

NVIDIA QuadroFX 5800 Reviewed

HotHardware have been really lucky to get their hands on the latest NVIDIA QuadroFX cards.

 

The QuadroFX 4800 is a much more palatable high-end solution, coupling together a GT200 graphics processor with 1.5 GB of memory and a price tag nearly half that of the QuadroFX 5800. Let's find out how NVIDIA's massive GT200 graphics processor handles workstation-class loads instead of crunching pixels in Crysis...

Click here to read the full review

3D Card Review: VisionTek Radeon HD 4870 X2 2GB

Phoronix have reviewed a sweet performing Radeon HD 4870 X2 on their website.

 

In a majority of the benchmarks -- including those with anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering -- the ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 was within frames of the dual Radeon HD 4870 CrossFire configuration. However, in some tests such as running Enemy Territory: Quake Wars at 2560 x 1600, the R700 had fallen about eight frames behind, or about 6%. The Radeon HD 4870 X2 isn't quite as far as two Radeon HD 4870 512MB graphics cards linked together via CrossFire, but it's darn close.

[Phoronix] VisionTek Radeon HD 4870 X2 2GB Review

3D Card Review: Palit Radeon 4850

TweakTown has reviewed the Palit Radeon 4850.

 

The good thing about Palit is the aggressive pricing, which means you can actually get your hands on one of these cards for similar prices, or sometimes cheaper than what some brands charge for the stock model, which makes it quite an attractive purchase.

Palit Radeon HD 4850 Sonic Graphics Card :: TweakTown

Intel's 'Larrabee' to Shakeup AMD, Nvidia - Tom's Hardware

 

Performance wise, rumors have it that Larrabee is expected no earlier than 2009 and shall be only as fast as todays current generation of GPUs upon release. According to a recent paper from Intel, simulated Larrabee performance would have us believe that with 25-cores, each running at 1GHz, we would be able to run both F.E.A.R. and Gears of War at 60 FPS. Speculating that Larrabee will be released with 32-cores, running at over 2GHz each, it is possible that Larrabee could actually be faster than rumored. Other than performance, another concern for Larrabee is its drivers and support. Even excellent hardware can be tainted by poorly written drivers and lack of support in the industry. There has been a lot of criticism of Intels past ability to write quality drivers, adding to the concern, but Intel still has time to address this matter properly. Larrabee has a really rather flexible and programmable design that ultimately depends on the drivers and supplied compilers for it to be useful.

 

Intel's 'Larrabee' to Shakeup AMD, Nvidia - Tom's Hardware

More Info on Lucid's flexibele multi-gpu-technology

More info on this "Bridge' chip was presented at IDF. This might even be a revolution in the high-end gaming segment. Lucid is building a new "real-time distributed processing engine" system on a chip called HYDRA, which can mix and match any GPU from any manufacturer and work with any chipset, and piles it all together for performance scaling that Lucid claims is "near-linear" or even "above-linear."

More Info on Lucid's flexibele multi-gpu-technology

ATI Radeon 4870 X2 Review: AMD is back on top!

HotHardware has put up a review of the latest ATI/AMD Radeon 4870 X2 and looks like AMD is on top of the game again!

Make no mistake, the new Radeon HD 4870 X2 marks ATI's return to the top of the 3D graphics food chain.  It took a few years, but through steady improvements in multi-GPU software support, and a new strategy regarding the design and manufacture of high-end graphics cards that utilizes two mid-sized chips in lieu of a single monolithic one, AMD was able to produce a graphics card capable of outpacing the best NVIDIA currently has to offer.

Read the ATI Radeon 4870 X2 Review here.

Nvidia licenses Transmeta

Saw this news over at TomsHardware

According to Transmeta, Nvidia has been granted a “non-exclusive license to Transmeta’s Longrun and Longrun 2 technologies and other intellectual property”. Nvidia paid a “one-time, non-refundable license fee of $25 million”.

You can read the full story here.

Geforce GTX 200 Architecture Review

XBitLabs has put up an architecture review of the new Geforce GTX 200 series. Take a peek at what they have to say!

New Nvidia chip codenamed G200 was supposed to top the traditional approach to GPU design: the most complex, the most expensive, the most powerful and of course the fastest of all. Everything was at stake here: the company didn’t stop at anything trying to prove to the world who the real king of consumer 3D graphics was.

To read the full article, click here.

BFG 9800 GX2 Review

TheTechLounge has reviewed the BFG 9800 GX2 1GB version.

It would be very, very hard not to covet this video card. I know I recently said that the 9800 GTX was the sexy card, but this one might actually look nicer, eye of the beholder and all. And it's not just skin-deep, this card is faaast, and because of that, we can overlook its frightening heat production and power consumption.

To read the full review, click here.

Gigabyte HD 4850 Review

Overclockersclub has posted a review of the new Gigabyte HD 4850.

The Gigabyte HD 4850 is just your average Radeon HD 4850 with the exception of its overclocking headroom. The card performed almost exactly the same as the competing 4850. When I overclocked the card, I wasn't expecting it to go far since the temperatures were quite high as it was (the card was idle at 70 degrees Celsius!), but this Gigabyte 4850 still pumped out some pretty good clock speeds. I was able to raise the core GPU clock of 625MHz up to 675MHz and the memory from 990MHz to 1075MHz, but I couldn't go any further due to temperatures because they were approaching almost 90 degrees Celsius! With an aftermarket heatsink and fan, I have no doubt in my mind that this card can be pushed even more because it's hard to overclock with a video card that idles at 70C without any aftermarket parts. However, a 50MHz increase on the GPU clock speed is good headroom if you ask me. If you look back at our first 4850 review, you'll notice that this Gigabyte HD 4850 was overclocked twice as much as that card.

To read the full review, click here.

Galaxy silent heat pipe 9600 GT review

Guru3D has reviewed the new Galaxy silent heat pipe 9600 GT. If you are looking for a completely noiseless budget gaming card, this is it!

Galaxy's GeForce 9600 GT 512MB Silent heatpipe graphics card is once again a fine product to own. I like the somewhat customized design and I definitely am charmed by the cooler. Even on a hot day, it performed good enough in our test-environment. You however will need decent airflow inside that PC of yours to get that residual heat from the innards of your PC and you need to remember that the cooler is pretty bulky. Bulky or not, it will only eat up one slot, as the big heatink was placed on the rear-side of the card, in some cases at that position a x1 PCIe slot is located but not really a big deal. Pretty clever really, it has Galaxy written all over it as they really do think about these things.

To read the full review, click here.

Best video cards for money, August 2008

TomsHardware have posted their best picks for the month of August, 2008.

They include,

PCI Express Interface: $0 To $130

 

PCI Express Interface: $150 To $300

 

PCI Express Interface: $350 To $400

 

Best Gaming Graphics Cards For The Money: AGP Interface

 

Yup, those people still running on AGP cards can also have a go at this.

To read the full article click here.

PowerColor Radeon HD 4850 2 GB GDDR3 Reviewed

Guru3D has reviewed this new baby from PowerColor. At a price of $249, its one hell of a sweet deal.

So overall this product is performing roughly equal to the reference Radeon HD 4850. The big gain you'll get from the product is actually it's cooling. The included zeroTHERM cooler slapped on top of that GPU really does it's job nicely. Where the reference products scare me a little with the high peak temperatures the idle and load temperatures of this product are just extremely nice.

Quadrupling the memory size towards 2 GB luckily didn't mean quadrupling the price, though at roughly 249 USD / 169 EUR it is a couple of tenners more expensive than the regular product yet also close to the HD 4870. Overall we certainly can recommend the PowerColor 4850 2GB, yet place a big question marker on the fact whether you ever use the on-board 2 GB framebuffer.

To read the full review, click here.

Galaxy Geforce 9500GT Review

Guru3D has reviewed the new Geforce 9500GT. The card costs under a 100 dollars and is aimed at the budget market.

With this product Galaxy definitely set a new standard in the budget range of products though. Never have I seen a product in this price-category so pimped up. Excellent clocks, good overclockability, sound and excellent PCB design. Heck they even slapped a custom cooler on top of the product. The end-result is an extraordinary performing and looking product, within it's defined product category. Props to Galaxy for doing so.

Force3D to offer Accelero cooled Radeon 4850 4870

Force3D has announced that they will be using coolers by Arctic Cooling called the Accelero Twin Turbo.

Force3D to offer Accelero cooled Radeon 4850 4870

HIS Radeon HD 4850 ICEQ4 Pixelated

 Guru3D reports,

HIS has been working on a new cooler for the pretty hot Radeon HD 4850 and 4870 products.

They further add that,

HIS expects the products to the market in August. Would be great to see some custom 3rd party cooled Radeon HD 4000 series products. This by the way is the Radeon HD 4850.

 

HIS Radeon HD 4850 ICEQ4 Pixelated

13 Years of NVIDIA

Tomshardware has an interesting article about the 13 years of NVIDIA which had it's ups and downs. The article details all the company's offerings from the NV1 to the latest G90 GPUs. If you are an NVIDIA buff, you should definitely check out this article.

Leadtek WinFast PX9600 GSO Extreme 384MB

This new baby from Leadtek packs quite a punch for a low price.

Tweaktown reviewed it and had the following conclusions,

While the bundle was clearly on the lighter side of things, the cooler of choice and overall performance on offer here from the 9600 GSO Extreme is excellent. If you find yourself wanting a quick 9600 GSO that performs pretty much like a 9600GT; sometimes better, sometimes slightly worse, for the same price and with better noise levels and temperatures, this card is great.

To read the full 18 page review, click here.

EVGA Geforce 260 reviewed

Ocia.net have just reviewed the new EVGA Geforce 260 graphics card.

Here is what they have to say about the card,

I have nothing but good things to say about EVGA. Their customer service folks are top notch and a pleasure to deal with, and their Step-Up program is just one of many benefits they offer to their buyers. Another is lifetime warranty, as long as you register your product through their online website. This is my second EVGA card, my original 8800GTS I used as trade-in for the GTX 260, and both worked flawlessly as long as I've owned them. While there was no game bundled with the plain-jane Step-Up card, many retail versions include one. As far as the rest of the bundle, all the required adapters and software are present and the inclusion of the overclocking Precision utility is a welcome addition.

To read the full review, click here.

HIS Radeon HD 3650 Review

Motherboards.org have reviewed HIS Radeon HD 3650.

The release of the HD4xxx series cards in the upcoming weeks means that ATI will have released their next generation card series. The 4850 is being released at a price point of $199, but nothing has been said about the mainstream version of that card that corresponds to the HD3650 being reviewed here. HD3650 fits into the $70-100 price range making it a mainstream choice for the consumer. The HIS card is an excellent example of the HD3650 as it has a high clock speed, good over-clock-ability, and the very high performance IceQ cooling system to keep the graphics chip cool even under load. The next few weeks should be interesting as new cards like the HD4850 and GTX260 reach the market, perhaps driving the prices of the higher performing cards like the HD3870 and 8800GT into this market.

To read the full review click here.

Sapphire HD 4870 Review

Overclockersclub has posted a review of the Sapphire HD 4870

 

The Sapphire HD 4870 performed exactly where the other HD 4870 cards have been and that is right on top of NVIDIA's GTX 260 series cards. I cannot stress enough the great performance that is being achieved by the HD 4870 cards for the price that it is to purchase them. Here you can have a top performing card without breaking the piggy bank. Sapphire sweetens the deal with all of the goodies and extras that they include, such as the 2GB thumb drive and full versions of popular software which to me always makes me feel like I am getting a better deal.

To read the full review, click here.

ASUS EN9800 GTX TOP Review

The fine folks over at HotHardware have just reviewed the new ASUS EN9800 GTX.

Thanks to its factory overclock, the ASUS EN9800GTX TOP outperformed a stock GeForce 9800 GTX across the board and compared favorably with our reference systems. There are times when the reference 8800 GTX can beat out the reference 9800 GTX, but the EN9800GTX TOP's faster clock speeds give it an edge most of the time. If performance is your bag and you're in the market for a relatively affordable NVIDIA GPU, then you should definitely lean towards an overclocked version of the 9800 GTX, like the EN9800GTX TOP, in order to make sure it outperforms its predecessor.

To read the full review, click here.

Palit 9600 GSO Review

Mikhailtech has posted a review of the Palit 9600 GSO.

I really like that this card had a very efficient custom fan, and also silent at its default speeds. The fan is programmed to start at low speed when you start your computer and it is not loud until you load the Nvidia drivers, like most of the other cards.

The card also received Mikhailtech editor's choice award.

To read the full review click here.

AMD/ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 Preview

Guru3D has posted a preview of AMD's upcoming Radeon HD 4870 X2 graphics card.

So with that being said, I'm ending this preview for now ... My experiences with the card have been really good, the performance is flabbergasting. If priced right, this is the new king in the high-end arena of graphics cards. I'm impressed, really impressed. And that's a hard thing for a company to achieve.

To read the full preview, click here.

AMD ATI Catalyst 8.7 released, promise higher performance

AMD has just released the latest Catalyst 8.7 drivers which they say will provide 20% higher increased performance in 3DMark Vantage and frame rate increases of up to 15% in games like Company of Heroes, Los Planet and Call of Duty 4. Linux fans will be happy as the drivers now include support for Ubuntu 8.04 and SLED 10 sp2. You can download the drivers from the following link. (alternatively, you can click the picture below)

Source: TomsHardware

Zotac Geforce 9800 GTX Review

Xbitlabs has posted a review of the Zotac Geforce 9800 GTX.

Highs:

• The best performance among contemporary singe-chip graphics cards;
• Wide range of supported FSAA modes;
• Excellent quality of anisotropic filtering;
• Hardware HD-video decoding and post-processing support;
• Sound over HDMI;
• No compatibility issues;
• Relatively low power consumption;
• Highly efficient cooling;
• Low noise;
• Bundle bonus (Lost: The Video Game)

Lows:

• Long PCB may not fit into some system cases;
• Requires two power supply connectors;
• No software for playback of HD video content bundled with the card.

To read the full review, click here.

Visiontek HD 4870 Review

Overclockersclub have just posted a review of the new VisionTek HD 4870

Pros:

• Rivals the speed of the GTX 260
• GDDR5 memory
• CrossfireX support for multi-GPU setups
• On-Chip HDCP
• 55nm manufacturing process
• Built-in HDMI and 7.1 surround sound support
• Price to performance ratio very impressive 

Cons:

• Still has the heating issue
• Not very high overclocking potential

To read the full review click here.

Nvidia to Launch Intel-based MCP7A IGP Chipset in August

NVIDIA is all set to mass produce it's latest Intel IGP Chipset, the GeForce 9-Series mGPU – nForce 730i MCP (MCP7A) by the middle of August and will appear in markets in September.

The MCP7A will come in two versions, the MCP7A-U with a GeForce 9400 graphics core and the MCP7A-S with GeForce 9300 graphics. The two versions have the same specifications except the GeForce 9400 features a core frequency of 580MHz and shader frequency of 1500MHz, while the GeForce 9300 will be clocked at 450MHz and 1200MHz.

The MCP7A support a FSB up to 1333MHz, dual-channel DDR2 or DDR3 memory, and PCI Express 2.0. The GPU is based on Nvidia's G86 graphics core, which supports DirectX 10 and Shader Model 4.0, includes 16 built-in stream processors, and supports HDMI, dual-link DVI, DisplayPort and D-sub connections.

The MCP7A will also support Hybrid SLI, PureVideo and Cuda technologies.

Source: Digitimes

NVIDIA Joins SOI Consortium

NVIDIA has joined the SOI Industry Consortium, the organization announced today. The SOI Industry Consortium was founded in 2007 with the goal to accelerate the development and adoption of silicon-on-insulator (SOI) technologies.

Other members of the industry organization include AMD, ARM, Chartered, Freescale, IBM, Samsung, STMicroelectronics, TSMC, and UMC.

NVIDIA did not provide any information about future products that may include SOI technology.

Source: TomsHardware

XFX Cash Back on Geforce GTX 200 Series

In response to recent market fluctuations, XFX is taking the history-making stance of offering up to $120 cash back to its dedicated technology-forward customers who purchased its GeForce GTX 280 and GeForce GTX 260 graphics cards between June 16, 2008 and July 11, 2008. This offer is available only to customers and purchases in the US and Canada. Rules and certain restrictions apply.
"Market conditions in recent days have caused the price of these two graphics cards to drop significantly," explains XFX USA President, Eddie Memon. "However these cards were just introduced to our customers a few weeks ago. We want to thank our customers for their continued loyalty, and also to reassure them that we are committed to them and to their ongoing satisfaction."
And, for those who have been wanting these cards but price has been a barrier, the new price structure is a big bonus. Both graphics cards harness the power of second generation unified architecture, SLI technology and top-of-the-line DirectX 10 support, creating a gaming "reality" that, thanks to blazing fast frame rates, is a truly in-your-face experience.
The GeForce 280 GTX features second generation NVIDIA® Unified Architecture that delivers 50% more gaming performance (compared to the first generation) thanks to 240 enhanced processor cores and a graphics clock of 602 MHz that provide incredible shading horsepower. The GeForce® 260 is no slouch, either, with 192 Processor Cores and a graphics clock of 576 MHz.

NVIDIA's new GPU PhysX™ technology renders convincing facial expressions, multiple ultra-high polygon characters in complex environments and convincing physical effects like weather and explosions. Both cards come NVIDIA PhysX®-Ready, however NVIDIA Phys drivers are required to experience in-game GPU PhysX acceleration.
NVIDIA CUDA™ technology and the new CUDA runtime for Windows Vista enables programmers to offload the most intensive processing tasks from their CPU to their graphics card(s), putting the power of up to 240 multi-threaded processor cores to work for you. From transcoding video or running Folding@home in the background while web surfing, GeForce® GTX 200 graphics cards deliver performance improvements of up to seven times a tradition CPU.
GigaThread™ Technology, Lumenex™ Engine, 16x Anti-aliasing Technology, and 128-bit floating point High Dynamic-Range (HDR) Lighting guarantees top-of-the-line performance right out of the box. OpenGL 2.1 support, Dual Dual-link DVI Support, PureVideo® HD Technology and dual-stream hardware acceleration rounds out the leading features.

Yup, you heard it right, if you were one of those early adopters of the card, XFX will pay you back cold hard cash for the price drop for this product.

Source: Hothardware

Lucid to provide hybrid GPU solutions

An Israel based company is claiming to provide a solution that will enable users to fit in both NVIDIA and ATI graphics cards at the same time in their motherboards and benefit from increased performance. They also claim that the performance achieved will be much higher than normal SLi and Crossfire solutions.

"The real-time distributed processing engine, called HYDRA™, offers a groundbreaking approach to scaling 3D graphics performance in a multi-GPU environment. Outlined for the first time on the new Lucid Web site at www.lucidlogix.com, the novel technology is the industry’s first to work with any GPU, any CPU or chipset and on any application that gamers and professionals may choose...
The HYDRA engine combines a system-on-chip with exclusive software technologies that efficiently load-balances graphics processing tasks, delivering another industry breakthrough:  near-linear to above-linear performance with two, three or more graphics cards. All together, the technology means people will be able to customize and tweak their PC to achieve the price, performance and power balance they want – whether it is a mainstream system or a high-performance gaming package."

If all their claims are true, this can result in fantastic performance for the end users! Can't wait!

Source: Lucidlogix

ASUS ENGTX260 TOP 896MB (NVIDIA GTX260) Review

Overclock3D has a review of the Geforce ENGTX260 graphics card.

While the GTX280 may still be king of the latest gen when it comes to performance, ASUS have certainly closed the gap with the release of their pre-overclocked ENGTX260 TOP. Coming within only a few insignificant FPS in most games and showing good potential to take things even further with a bit of manual overclocking using nTune, the performance of the card is really quite stunning.

Shifting these FPS results over to our "Cost Per Frame" scale reveals that the ENGTX260, with its £220 retail price, does sit comfortably at the lower end of the scale, offering a good balance of performance to price. Ideally, we would have liked to place the card head-to-head with a pre-overclocked AMD HD4870 considering this card has been touted as its rival, but as supply of these cards is fairly thin on the ground for most AIB partners, this is something that is going to have to wait until a later date.

To read the full review click here.

Rambus sues NVIDIA for patent infringement

NVIDIA is already facing a lot of problems regarding the strong launch of the ATI's 4000 series of graphics cards along with the millions of dollars in repairs it has to pay for faulty mobile Geforce Go series of graphics cards (namely the 8400 M and the 8600 M). Now a technology licensing company, called Rambus, has sued NVIDIA to add to it's woes, here is a snippet from the official press release,

Rambus Inc. (NASDAQ: RMBS), one of the world's premier technology licensing companies specializing in high-speed memory architectures, today announced it has filed suit in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California against NVIDIA Corporation for patent infringement.
The lawsuit alleges that a number of NVIDIA products with memory controllers for SDR, DDR, DDR2, DDR3, GDDR, and GDDR3 SDRAM infringe 17 Rambus patents. The accused products in the complaint include chipsets, graphics processors, media communication processors, multimedia applications processors and other products from at least six NVIDIA product lines. Rambus is seeking injunctive relief barring the infringement, contributory infringement, and inducement to infringe the Rambus patents, as well as monetary damages.

Source: Elite Bastards

Best graphics cards for the money: July 2008

Tomshardware has posted an interesting article for the month of July about the best video cards for the price. These include the sub $130, sub $175, sub $200 to $450 and AGP categories as well.

Don’t worry too much about which brand you choose, because all of the cards out there stick pretty close to the reference designs by Nvidia and ATI. Just pay attention to price, warranty, and the manufacturer’s reputation for honoring the warranty if something goes wrong.

Also remember that the stores don’t follow this list. Things will change over the course of the month, and you’ll probably have to adapt your buying strategy to fluctuating prices. Good luck!

To read the full article, click here.

Diamond Viper Radeon HD 3870 and 3870 HD 1 GB

Hothardware has reviewed the new Radeon HD 3870 and a Radeon 3870 1 GB version. The first one is a plain vanilla version while the latter is an overclocked version with GDDR4 memory slapped on.

Diamond continues the tradition of the Viper brand name by releasing dual versions based on the Radeon HD 3870 GPU.  While the benchmarks prove that NVIDIA still holds the upper hand in performance, it's fair to say that ATI has a good competitor in the price vs. performance department, with many HD 3870 models, including Diamond's 512MB version, currently hovering around $150 these days.  The 1GB GDDR3 version comes a higher clocked GPU to go along with the double sized memory buffer, but these additions didn't offer all that much more performance.  Couple the overclocked1GB model's only slightly higher performance with its significantly higher price of around $230 ($190 with current MIR), and it's difficult to justify spending the extra money, especially now that the Radeon HD 4850 has arrived for about the same price.

To read the full review click here.

Albatron releases Retrospective "PCI" Geforce 8 Cards

In a surprising move, Albatron has answered the pleas of thousands of customers who were stuck with motherboards that do not have a PCI-e or AGP slot. The new Albatron cards based on the Geforce 8 chip are all PCI slot based. That's right, PCI and not PCI-express.

Albatron Technology recently unveiled three new "PCI" graphics cards at Computex 2008. You read it right - "PCI" and not "PCI Express"! The PCI8600GT-256X, the PCI8500GT-256X and the PCI8400GS-256 are all VGAs that retrofit recent GeForce 8 Series graphics onto older PCI technology. These cards all offer a significant graphics boost along with dual monitor capabilities for an entire generation of integrated-graphics, PCI-only mainboards.

To check then out, head over their website.

Force3D Radeon 4850 and 4870 Review

Guru3d.com has posted a nice review of Force3D's new graphics cards, namely the Radeon 4850 and 4870.

At 199 USD the Radeon HD 4850 just offers astounding, seriously let me say that again, astounding performance for the money. You really can't go wrong with that product, no matter what brand you purchase. Though slightly more expensive I do like to recommend you guys a Radeon HD 4870. The cards do get really hot and the 4870 has cooling designed top push out the hot air from the PC where the 4850 will dump it inside your PC. Next to that the overall performance of the 4870 is just amazing to see, it has that extra little bite that I like so much ton see as a  reviewer. Let's recap a little, we have been playing Call of Duty 4 at 2560x1600 with 4xAA and all image quality setting maxed out at an average of 40 frames per second.

Crysis performance is pretty darn good. Race Driver GRID pushed the card towards leading performance and in my favorite new title, Mass Effect, the card again was faster than a 399 USD GeForce GTX 260. So yes, we can discuss it over and over again but money wise you just can't go wrong with the Radeon 4800 series, you'll love them without any doubt.

For the full review, click here.

ATI Radeon Physx Update

A while back I posted a news item about NGOHQ developing an application to run Nvidia Physx on a Radeon graphics card. The website still is not getting access to the new 4800 series of cards from AMD and strangely, NVIDIA is supporting NGOHQ to bring out their new application. Here is the full announcement about their ongoing progress.

I would like to update you about what’s going on. First, we were very pleased to see so many users and readers have applied to our Beta Test Program! To be specific: 191 users, 5 spies and 2 double agents have submitted applications during the last week. Those that will be chosen will be informed early before the beta is available – we can’t still point to “when” at this stage.
The bad news is we still don’t have access to any HD 4800 hardware yet. It is very important for this project to receive AMD’s support on both developer and PR levels. It seems that AMD still is not being cooperative, we get the feeling that they want this project to fail. Perhaps their plans are to strangle PhysX since AMD and Intel have Havok. We truly hope this is not the case since “format wars” are really bad for the consumers (For example: Blu-ray vs. HD-DVD).
Before we get to the good news, I’m going to ask you to hold on to something steady as some of you are going to feel a bit dizzy after you hear this. The truth is… Nvidia is now helping us with the project and it seems they are giving us their blessings. It’s very impressive, inspiring and motivating to see Nvidia's view on this. Why they help us? My best guess would be: They probably want to take on Intel with CUDA and to deal with the latest Havok threat from both AMD and Intel.
Some other good news, we are getting a lot of help from cool journalists like Theo Valich to address the HD 4800 access issue. I can confirm that our CUDA Radeon library is almost done and everything is going as planned on this side. There are some issues that need to be addressed, since adding Radeon support in CUDA isn’t a big deal - but it’s not enough! We also need to add CUDA support on AMD’s driver level and its being addressed as we speak.

Source: NGOHQ.com

Sapphire Radeon 4850 512 MB Review

Elite Bastards have a review on their website for the new Sapphire Radeon 4850 512MB graphics card.

RV770 has taken those excellent features, improved upon them in places, and most importantly overhauled every aspect of their architecture that was in need of attention, all while managing to create a GPU which is cheap enough to produce to attack NVIDIA at the most relevant price points for the majority of gamers.  Rather than simply throwing more and more shader power at the Radeon HD 4800 series (although this does get a major boost as well), AMD have played smart in improving texture filtering and ROP performance to address their previous areas of concern, and those changes shine through like a blinding light of hope in our testing.  Indeed, looking over our real-world testing results, it's almost like an entire reversal of roles when the Radeon HD 4850 is pitted against a reference GeForce 9800 GTX - While previous generations would see AMD's parts ruling the roost without any eye candy enabled but falling well behind with anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering turned on, so NVIDIA are now left in exactly the same position.  While the GeForce 9800 GTX frequently gets to strut its stuff when rendering 'straight', adding those all-important features to increase image quality that we all know and love sees the Radeon HD 4850 pull away, quite significantly in places.

They also awarded the card with an Elite Performance Award.

To read the full review click here.

Geforce 9800 GTX+ Review

The fine folks over at Guru3D have a review for the new Geforce 9800 GTX+

One of the most stunning facts for the GTX+ however was the flexibility in overclocking. I means seriously, this was the real deal for sure, we boosted the already impressive 728 core, 1836 shader and 2200 MHz clock frequencies pretty easily towards an amazing 860 MHz on the core, 2133 on the shader domain and 2490 MHz on the memory. That instantly will add another 15-20% performance towards your framerate. So tweaking wise this also is a very interesting product. Though in all fairness .. overclocking results can differ per batch and board partner.

Next to the smaller 55nm fab, internally some small features might have been altered as well. The GTX+ does seem to be a tad more efficient compared to it's 65nm counterpart. In fact is was performing precisely the same as the Black Edition GeForce 9800 GTX we just tested. Bang for your bucks people.

It was also awarded the Guru3D great value award

To read the full review click here.

AMD Radeon HD 4870x2 Leaked Images

The following images were leaked showing the new AMD Radeon HD 4870X2 card. It is also rumored to be released around the mid of August.

The card will be equipped with 2GB of GDDR5 memory and will be priced around $499.

Source: Engadget

Gateway P-6831FX Gaming Notebook

Not exactly 3d card news but still worth mentioning since this $1,300 gaming laptop really provides excellent performance for the price. Yes, it's actually quite well priced and is affordable, yet it performs better than most laptops twice it's price.

 

Overall, the P-6831FX provided top-notch gaming performance unmatched in its price range. Unfortunately the P-6831FX isn't so much a well-rounded performer and processor performance left much to be desired. While the P-6831FX can handle basic productivity tasks without too much trouble, it's definitely out of its element a bit when it isn't running games.

Review: Hothardware

NV PhysX Tweaker

This little utility lets you disable the PhysX on the Geforce card and simulate it on the CPU instead.

Matuus, our in-house Guru3D NVHardpage programmer stumbled into the same issue I had as well. The NVIDIA PhysX driver once install will activate itself on the GPU, and can not be disabled.

Required: Windows Vista 32-bit, GeForce G80/G92/GT200 and NV PhysX drivers

This little NV PhysX Tweaker tool will allow you to actually choose to enable or disable the PhysX driver over the GPU and if preferred, the CPU. Very simple, yet very handy.

If you have UAC enabled, you must run this software as Administrator.

Source and download: Guru3d

9800 GT Spotted on a Chinese Website

A Chinese website is showing a picture of a 9800 GT graphics card by NVIDIA. It seems to be the only single slot design for the 9800 series. It is still unknown whether or not this card will beat the 4850 in performance numbers.

Source: http://vga.zol.com.cn/

Geforce GTX 200 Series Prices Falling

With the excellent ATI 4800 cards, NVIDIA is facing stiff competition and in a response to that, it has dramatically decreased the prices of it's flagship cards, with the GTX 280 seeing a pricefall of almost 200 dollars!!

Newegg shows an offering on a GeForce GTX 280 graphics card for $459.99 after a $40 mail-in-rebate and cards from other brands like Asus and Palit are also available for around $499. It seems NVIDIA is cutting the price extremely hard. A couple of days ago you had to shelve out $649 for a GTX 280 but now you can get it for almost $200 less.
Furthermore, the GeForce GTX 260 is now available for $299.99 and ZipZoomfly even has one with a $40 mail-in-rebate so the card costs only $259.

Source: Guru3d.com

ATI Physx

Not much is known about the above screenshot but the folks who were behind creating the infamous SLI Patch are working on ATI Physx implementation right now. This is going to port the NVIDIA Physx to ATI GPUs,

At a recent NVIDIA event, when questions about porting PhysX to ATI GPUs came up, representatives from NVIDIA said there is nothing stopping anyone from downloading the CUDA SDK and doing the necessary work.

Source: Hothardware.com

Asus EAH3870 X2 1GB Review

Bit-tech has just reviewed the Asus Radeon EAH3870 X2 1GB.

UK Price (as reviewed): £242.33 (inc. VAT)
US Price (as reviewed): $399.99 (ex. Tax)
Core Clock: 825MHz
Memory Clock: 1,800MHz
Warranty: Three years parts and labour

I have to say that I’m impressed with the Asus EAH3870 X2 graphics card – it’s quite a step away from the reference design and innovation like this should be encouraged. The inclusion of four DVI ports will be a welcome addition for anyone looking to run more than a couple of monitors on their workstation and what makes it even better is the fact that, unlike Nvidia’s SLI, ATI CrossFireX technology scales across multiple displays.

Source: bit-tech.net | Review - Asus EAH3870 X2 1GB

Nvidia GeForce GTX 280 analysis

If you are interested in learning out exactly how NVIDIA has implemented it's cutting edge technology into this amazing graphics card, head over to bit-tech.net to get a full scoop of the Geforce GTX 280 architecture along with a review.

Source: bit-tech.net | Review - GT200: Nvidia GeForce GTX 280 analysis

ATI All in Wonder Resurrected

In 2006 we all heard that AMD would be discontinuing the manufacture of ATI All in Wonder cards due to growing problems of incompatibility with Windows Vista Media Center and the tuning/capture devices on the cards. However, HotHardware.com is reporting that AMD is planning to resurrect the series with a TV Wonder 650 with a Radeon HD 3650 GPU.

Cards will sport a hardware MPEG-2 encoder, native HDMI connections along with DVI outputs, composite video inputs and outputs, component outputs, and support OTA HD, Clear QAM digital cable TB tuning (some of the connectors are on a separate daughterboard that connects via a small ribbon cable).  Of course, all of the features inherent to the Radeon HD 3650 GPU will be exposed as well, as will the features of the ATI Theater 650 chip.  We should also note that unlike previous AIW cards, this new version will be fully compatible with Windows Vista.

 

Source: HotHardware