June 22, 2005

NVIDIA has just released their new NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX graphics card, and a number of tech sites have published reviews of it. The card has a number of new features compared to previous NVIDIA cards, in addition to being faster. The reviews look closely at the card as well as perform the usual system, synthetic, and gaming benchmarks.

June 14, 2005

HardwareZone has published a massive 22 page comparison and review of the seven top RADEON X800 XL graphics cards. The cards reviewed were the Elsa Falcox PX80 XL, the GeCube RADEON X800 XL, the Gigabyte GV-RX80L256V, the HIS X800 XL IceQ II Turbo, the MSI RX800 XL-VT2D256E, the PowerColor RADEON X800 XL, and the Sapphire RADEON X800 XL Ultimate. See how these cards compare in terms of features and performance in a number of synthetic and gaming benchmarks.

June 8, 2005

AnandTech has published a review of ATI's new Mobility Radeon X800 XT notebook graphics chipset. One major difference between the Mobility Radeon X800 XT chpset and the previous Mobility Radeon X800 is that the newer chipset has 16 pixel pipelines instead of 12. This makes the X800 XT just as powerful as most desktop graphics cards from ATI. To evaluate performance, benchmark tests of Half Life 2, Doom 3, and Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory were conducted on an Alienware Area-51M 7700 notebook containing a 3.8 GHz Pentium 4 processor, 1 GB of RAM, and of course an ATI Mobility Radeon X800 XT graphics chipset.

June 1, 2005

ATI Technologies has announced that their new Radeon R520 graphics processor features hardware accelerated H.264 Advanced Video Codec (AVC) decoding. The H.264 compression format is used on forthcoming HD-DVD and Blu-Ray movie titles, and is twice as efficient at compressing video as MPEG-2, the current standard.

May 31, 2005

A number of tech review sites have published articles detailing ATI's new CrossFire multi-GPU rendering technology. CrossFire supports several methods to load balance graphics rendering among multiple graphics processors, including SuperTiling, Scissor, and Alternative Frame Rendering. All game titles benefit from CrossFire right out of the box, because the ATI drivers can adaptively select the most efficient method based on the game title being played. The articles also benchmark several game titles, look at other features like the new Super AA anti-aliasing modes, and compare CrossFire to NVIDIA's SLI technology.

May 23, 2005

Bit-Tech has published a lengthy five part series of articles looking closely at SLI technology from NVIDIA. The articles look at motherboards, specific SLI graphic cards, game performance, optimum CPU selection, power supply requirements, and more.

May 22, 2005

The Register has published a review of the ATI X600 All-in-Wonder Pro, a 3D graphics card designed for multimedia and home theater applications. Features include an ATI RV380 GPU running at 400 MHz, an ATI Theater 200 chip, a digital TV tuner module, bi-directional PCI Express x16, and 256 MB of DDR RAM at 300 MHz. Video output connectors include VGA, DVI-I, D-SUB, S-Video, and composite video. The card accepts RF and analog cable TV input. The Theater 200 chip features hardware anti-aliasing, automatic gain control, stereo audio processing, horizontal and vertical video scaling, adaptive 2D comb filtering and support for PAL, SECAM and NTSC broadcast standards. Software includes ATI's Multimedia Center suite, which handles TV channel selection and scanning; pausing, recording and scheduled recording of live TV broadcasts; tuning, pausing, recording and scheduled recording of live FM radio broadcasts; and video capture in MPEG 4, Real, Windows Media Video 9, and DivX file formats.

April 26, 2005

ATI plans to reveal its Multi VPU technology sometime around June. Multi VPU will allow multiple ATI graphics cards to work in parallel, similar to SLI technology from NVIDIA. Motherboards will have to use either the RD400 or RD480 chipset in order to take advantage of Multi VPU. According to some, Multi VPU is a better technology than SLI, and since graphics cards from ATI are generally faster than those from NVIDIA, this is sure to be an interesting battle.

April 17, 2005

Beyond3D and Tom's Hardware have published reviews of the ATI All-In-Wonder X800 XT, a board designed for high powered 3D graphics and for high-end PC multimedia and video capture. The product is based on ATI's R420 graphics processor and ATI's Theatre 200 video capture and encoding chip. Features include Smartshader HD, Smoothvision HD, Hyper Z HD, VideoShader HD, and ATI's TV Tuner. Connectors include RF input for TV and FM Radio signal, a stereo mini-jack audio input, an A/V in connector, S-Video, composite video and stereo audio connections.

April 5, 2005

Today NVIDIA announced their nForce 4 SLI chipset for the Intel platform, known as nForce 4 SLI Intel Edition. A number of hardware news sites have already published lengthy reviews. See how the Intel SLI solution compares to SLI systems based on the AMD platform. The results of a number of system, synthetic, media encoding, and game benchmarks are provided.

April 2, 2005

Tom's Hardware has published a review of Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, along with a number of screenshots from the game. As the first major title to incorporate Shader Model 3.0 into its graphics engine, this game offers a glimpse of the exciting things to come.

April 1, 2005

HotHardware.com wanted to see which nForce 4 SLI motherboard is the king of the hill, so it put the DFI LANParty NF4 SLI-DR, the MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum/SLI, and the Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI to the test. This 18 page review includes feature comparisons, system benchmarks, game benchmarks, and media encoding benchmarks. The overall winner? The DFI LANParty NF4 SLI-DR.

March 25, 2005

AnandTech has reviewed the Wildcat Realizm 800 from 3Dlabs. This dual-GPU graphics card is aimed at the 3D graphics professional and is priced at, you might want to sit down for this, $2000. See how it compares to other professional graphics cards like the 3Dlabs Wildcat Realizm 200, the ATI FireGL X3-256, and the NVIDIA Quadro FX 4000.

March 24, 2005

FiringSquad and X-Bit Labs have posted lengthy reviews of the ATI Radeon X800 XL. X-Bit Labs has a 22 page review of the ATI's card with a focus on performance in various games. FiringSquad takes a look at six different X800 XL cards including the ASUS EAX800XL/2DTV, the ATI RADEON X800 XL, the Gigabyte GV-RX80L256V SilentPipe, the MSI RX800XL-VT2D256E, the PowerColor RADEON X800 XL, and the Sapphire RADEON X800 XL.

March 24, 2005

Seth Nickell has posted an informative report, with video clips, on new technologies making their way into X Windows. Luminosity integrates many OpenGL effects into X Windows, while Cairo increases the rendering quality of GTK+ widgets and allows them to scale cleanly to any resolution. These improvements will allow X Windows to fully compete with Microsoft's Avalon and WinFX rendering on Longhorn.

March 18, 2005

Viewsonic has announced that it will soon ship two LCD monitors with 4-millisecond response times. Designed for high-performance gaming, the 19-inch VX924 and the 17-inch VX724 are expected to ship in May and June, respectively. Specifications available for the VX924 state that the display has 1280x1024 pixels, and a 800:1 contrast ratio.

March 16, 2005

Some early details are emerging about ATI's forthcoming R520 graphics processor, codenamed "Fudo". According to sources, the chip will contain 300-350 million transistors and be fabricated using a 90nm process. Announcement of the product is expected in May or June, with graphics cards to be available in late Summer or early Fall.

March 15, 2005

Epic Games recently displayed a demo of Unreal Engine 3 at the Game Developers Conference (GDC). GameSpot has more details as well as three video clips of the software in action. The Unreal Engine 3 product page has additional information and many nice screenshots.

March 13, 2005

AMDGamer.com put two top of the line eVGA e-Geforce 6800 Ultra PCI-Express cards to the test in SLI mode. This is the fastest graphics subsystem currently available on the market. See how it does on your favorite games.

March 8, 2005

A new "total immersion" technology revealed at the Demo conference shows how 3D computer graphics are blended seamlessly into live video. A video clip (WMV, 6 minutes) shows how cool this is.