November 17th, 2009

GeForce GT 240 - NVIDIA's sub-$100 DirectX 10.1 graphics card

Posted by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes @ 2:50 pm

Categories: Gaming, Graphics, Hardware, NVIDIA

Tags: Card, Video Card, Nvidia GeForce, NVidia Corp., Graphics, DirectX, Adrian Kingsley-Hughes

You can get a lot of power for under $100 when it comes to GPUs nowadays, but NVIDIA have just launched the GeForce GT 240 - decent performance, low power consumption and a decent price.

OK, so what’s special about the GeForce GT 240? Well, to begin with, it fully supports DirectX 10.1, something which other high-end NVIDIA cards don’t do. Might seem a trivial point when you consider that ATI already have DirectX 11 parts out  been delayed until (NVIDIA’s Fermi has been delayed until 2010), but it’s darn hard to get hold of any Radeon HD 5870 or 5850 cards. Also, it’s early days for DirectX 11 anyway in terms of games.

OK, so it supports DirectX 10.1, what else is special about the GeForce GT 240? Well, it’s NVIDIA’s most powerful graphics card that doesn’t require an auxiliary PCIe power connector. This means no need to Read the rest of this entry »

November 5th, 2009

NVIDIA Inside?

Posted by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes @ 5:58 am

Categories: NVIDIA

Tags:

Is NVIDIA planning to enter the x86 chip business? Could you soon be buying a PC that has NVIDIA inside?

Here’s the scoop, thanks to the EETimes:

”We believe Nvidia could enter the x86 CPU business,” said analyst Doug Freedman of Broadpoint AmTech. ”Nvidia could become a supplier of x86 CPUs by necessity to preserve both GPU and chipset revenue.” Nvidia (Santa Clara, Calif.) has been quietly hiring former employees of Transmeta, a now-defunct, x86-based processor supplier. ”We believe internally developed x86 solutions are more likely than external acquisitions (i.e. Via Technologies),” he said in a new report, referring to rumors that Nvidia would acquire Taiwan’s Via. ”We believe that Nvidia has hired former Transmeta staff extensively, and that instruction code “morphing” requirements have declined as more x86 instructions have come off of patent coverage,” he said.

When you think about it, it makes a lot of sense. ATI has the backing of chipmaker AMD, and games aren’t driving high-end GPUs sales like they once did. Adding a chip arm could allow NVIDIA to push out platforms much in the same way AMD has been doing for a few years. It could also give the company an interesting advantage when it comes to netbooks and mobile devices too.

This is something we should be keeping an eye on because it could get very interesting.

October 16th, 2009

Best 'bang for the buck' graphics cards

Posted by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes @ 6:41 am

Categories: AMD/ATI, Components, Cutting Edge, Gaming, Graphics, Hardware, NVIDIA, Performance

Tags: Card, Video Card, Graphics, Radeon, Video Cards, Hardware, Components, Adrian Kingsley-Hughes

It seems that gamers are no longer willing to blow $500 on a graphics card. More and more of you wan to know what’s the best graphics card you can buy on a limited budget.

In this post I will look at the best graphics card you can buy in four different price brackets.

Sub $100

You can pick up some truly excellent graphics cards for under $100. In fact, if you buy the right bit of kit, you can pretty much get all the graphics card you’ll need for under $100.

There are two cards in particular worth looking at:

• SAPPHIRE 100265HDMI Radeon HD 4830 512MB (around $95)
• PowerColor AX4850 512MD3-PH Radeon HD 4850 512MB (around $99)

Given the choice I’d go for the PowerColor card because it offers a little more performance. Other than that, both have dual-monitor support, support for HDMI and offer a great gaming experience.

Sub $200

OK, with an increased budget you are looking at graphics cards that can deliver amazing gaming experience at high resolutions. Graphics cards in this price category are aimed at hardcore enthusiasts and in order to get the  best from them the rest of your hardware has to be of high-spec too. There’s no point adding an expensive graphics card to a low-end PC!

In the sub $200 price category you want to be looking at cards such as the following:

• XFX HD-577A-ZNFC Radeon HD 5770 1GB (around $175)
• EVGA 896-P3-1257-AR GeForce GTX 260 (around $199)

Here I’d go for the Radeon HD 5770 because it’s a newer card , based on newer technology, more powerful and cheaper than the NVIDIA card.

Next –>

October 7th, 2009

End of the line for NVIDIA chipsets, and that's official

Posted by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes @ 1:31 pm

Categories: NVIDIA

Tags: NVidia Corp., Chipsets, Semiconductors, Hardware, Components, Adrian Kingsley-Hughes

GPU giant NVIDIA has confirmed that the company is putting the brakes on the Nforce chipset line because of legal wranglings with Intel.

According to an spokesman, NVIDIA will “postpone further chipset investments”.

Intel claims that its four-year-old chipset license with NVIDIA doesn’t cover the Nehalem or Core series of CPUs. NVIDIA naturally disagrees with this and as a result is that both parties will fight it out in court sometime in 2010. What’s interesting is that NVIDIA has also halted development on chipsets for AMD processors too. NVIDIA claims that Read the rest of this entry »

October 6th, 2009

Is NVIDIA dead? (UPDATED)

Posted by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes @ 4:39 pm

Categories: AMD/ATI, NVIDIA

Tags: NVidia Corp., Advanced Micro Devices Inc., GPU, Reports, SemiAccurate, Adrian Kingsley-Hughes

Reports are circulating that NVIDIA is to kill off the GTX 260, GTX 275, and GTX 285 and exit the high-end and mid-range graphics card market. Is this the end for NVIDIA?

SemiAccurate has the scoop:

Word from sources deep in the bowels of 2701 San Tomas Expressway tell us that the OEMs have been notified that the GTX285 is EOL’d, the GTX260 is EOL in November or December depending on a few extraneous issues, and the GTX275 will be EOL’d within 2 weeks. I would expect this to happen around the time ATI launches their Juniper based boards, so before October 22.

Which leaves the GTX 295, but given that AMD/ATI now has 5xxx series cards that annihilate it, its lifespan can’t be that long either (Demerjian has a good analysis on why vendors won’t take a chance of stocking NVIDIA cards). And what does NVIDIA have in the pipeline for the near future … hmmm, Read the rest of this entry »

July 22nd, 2009

NVIDIA ForceWare 190.38 drivers out for GeForce/ION

Posted by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes @ 3:29 am

Categories: NVIDIA

Tags:

NVIDIA has released version 190.38 of its ForceWare drivers for the GeForce/ION graphics platform. This release supports GeForce 6, 7, 8, 9, 100, and 200-series GPUs and the ION platform. It is available for Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7, both 32-bit and 64-bit.

Here’s a quick tour of what’s new:

• Support added for OpenGL 3.1.
• Support added for CUDA 2.3 for improved performance in GPU Computing applications.
• New user-controlled power management settings for the GeForce 9-series and later graphics cards added.
• Includes several new control panel features.
• Bug fixes!

ForceWare 190.38 is available from NVIDIA.

May 28th, 2009

ASUS creates dual GeForce GTX 285 GPU MARS 295 Limited Edition "Frankencard"

Posted by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes @ 12:56 pm

Categories: NVIDIA

Tags: ASUS, Card, Nvidia GeForce, GPU, Adrian Kingsley-Hughes

Here’s a card that will offer any gamer the ultimate bragging rights … for a while. The ASUS MARS 295 Limited Edition takes two of the fastest GPUs available to create the ultimate graphics card.

The ASUS MARS 295 Limited Edition takes two GeForce 285 circuit boards (not 295 GPUs as the name suggests) featuring NVIDIA’s fastest single-GPU and joins them together via a built-in SLI bridge. But that’s not all! ASUS has kitted out each board with 2GB of GDDR3.

The result? A Frankencard!

• Dual 55nm GPUs clocked at 648MHz
• 480 stream processors, clocked at 1,476MHz
• 4,096MB of GDDR3 memory
• 2,125 peak GFLOPS and a peak fillrate of 41.47 Gpixel/s

If one of these cards isn’t enough then you could always get two and set up a quad-GPU SLI system.

The photo above says “Limited Edition 1/1000″ on the card, and if this is the case expect to pay some serious bucks for this card.

May 19th, 2009

Will these be the first DirectX 11 GPUs?

Posted by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes @ 3:24 am

Categories: AMD/ATI, Components, Graphics, Hardware, NVIDIA

Tags:

German hardware website hardware-infos.com has details on what it believes will be the first DirectX 11 from both NVIDIA and AMD/ATI.

Note: It’s important for me to point out that these numbers are unconfirmed. That said, they do look convincing.

AMD/ATI

Radeon HD 5870

• GPU clock: 900MHz
• Shader clock: 900MHz
• Memory clock: 4,400MHz
• Memory: 1GB GDDR5
• Manufacturing process: 40nm
• Peak GFLOPS: 2,160

Radeon HD 5870 X2

• GPU clock: 950MHz
• Shader clock: 950MHz
• Memory clock: 4,600MHz
• Memory: 2GB GDDR5
• Manufacturing process: 40nm
• Peak GFLOPS: 4,560

These numbers would make these parts almost twice as powerful as the current HD 4870 and HD 4870 X2 graphics cards.

NVIDIA

GeForce GTX 3xx (G300)

• GPU clock: 700MHz
• Shader clock: 1,600MHz
• Memory clock: 2,200MHz
• Memory: 1GB GDDR5
• Manufacturing process: 40nm
• Peak GFLOPS: 2,457

These numbers would make this part more than twice as powerful as the GeForce GTX 285.

March 3rd, 2009

NVIDIA and ATI look to redefine high-end mobile graphics

Posted by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes @ 4:35 am

Categories: AMD/ATI, Cutting Edge, Graphics, NVIDIA, Notebooks

Tags: Notebook, Mobile, Nvidia GeForce, NVidia Corp., ATI Technologies Inc., Graphics, GPU, Adrian Kingsley-Hughes

Yesterday saw a flurry of activity on the mobile GPU front from both NVIDIA and AMD/ATI.

ATI launched what is the world’s first 40nm GPUs - ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4860 and ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4830.

AMD today announced the world’s first graphics processors to harness 40nm process technology: the ATI Mobility RadeonTM HD 4860 and ATI Mobility RadeonTM HD 4830. These feature-rich graphics processors redefine mobile PC entertainment with advanced capabilities including support for the latest Microsoft DirectX® 10.1 games, a home theater-quality HD multimedia experience, and energy-efficient features for long battery life at work, at home or at play.

From NVIDIA we have the GeForce GTX 280M and 260M GPUs for enthusiast notebooks and the Read the rest of this entry »

February 19th, 2009

Planning on buying a high-end graphics card soon? DON'T!

Posted by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes @ 4:30 am

Categories: AMD/ATI, Components, Gaming, Graphics, Hardware, NVIDIA

Tags: Card, Video Card, Graphics, GPU, Games, Video Cards, Personal Technology, Hardware, Components, Adrian Kingsley-Hughes

Are you planning on dropping $250 or more on a graphics card any time soon? DON’T!

I’d advise anyone thinking of spending any kind of serious money on a serious high-end graphics card to put off that purchase for a few months and wait. Wait for what? 

Well, first off, I’m seeing a diminishing return from high-end graphics cards. Seriously. Apart from Crysis, I’ve not come across a game that seriously taxes these high-end cards that ATI and NVIDIA have been putting out for some time now.  I’m not sure what has happened to games, but they don’t seem to be driving the hardware any more. maybe this is down to the fact that all the major games consoles are getting a bit long in the tooth from a hardware point of view, and since many games nowadays are a port of a console game (or will be ported to the consoles) hardware demands have to be kept in check. Or maybe it’s that game makers have become wary of pushing high end hardware requirements onto gamers. Or maybe it’s just that the success of games such as World of Warcraft have proved that the success of a game has little to do with high-quality graphics. Whatever it is, there are few games out there now that will be limited by the GPU as long as you have a middle-of-the-road GPU fitted.

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