graphics

Nvidia has just announced that, after a little bit more than two years in the position, Nvidia's Chief Financial Officer, David White, has resigned for "personal reasons." Nvidia is not elaborating more than that broad explanation as to why their CFO has called it quits. After coming in for a retiring Martin Burke, White began during some of Nvidia's best financial times, but also weathered through Nvidia losing the market lead to AMD. While Nvidia searches for a new CFO, corporate controller and vice president of tax Karen Burns will serve as interim CFO. ...read more

AMD's latest driver suite, Catalyst 11.2, has been posted on AMD's site. Bringing a bevy of bugfixes and optimizations to the table, AMD continues along its monthly release schedule as promised. The majority of the improvements pertain to performance enhancements and added features for the Radeon HD 5000-series cards. ...read more

Nvidia has to be feeling pretty good about itself right about. Having recently released the GeForce GTX 580, Nvidia now owns the single-GPU performance crown, which it plucked from AMD's head. But with Cayman reportedly ready to ship on November 22nd, it looked like Nvidia's time at the top was going to be short lived.

Maybe not. AMD this week confirmed that it's pushing back the release of its Radeon HD 6970 and 6950 videocards build around the much anticipated "Cayman" architecture. The new release date is December 13, though it's tough to tell if there will be much quantity when the NDA lifts or if this is pretty much a paper launch.

Nvidia today announced its newest Fermi graphics card, the GeForce GTX 580. Reveiws from all over the Web indicate that this is the fastest single-GPU card on the planet, and trumped only by AMD's dual-GPU Radeon HD 5970.

"For the most recent games that feature tessellation -- the key feature of DX11 -- the 512-core GeForce GTX 580 is up to 160 percent faster than the closest competitive product. Even in previous-generation DX9 and DX10 games, the GeForce GTX 580 is faster by up to 62 percent, including in the blockbuster PC title StarCraft II," Nvidia claims.

In addition to more pixel pushing power than its predecessor, the GTX 480, Nvidia's latest DX11 part comes with a new heatsink design that allows it to run both cooler and quieter than before. Wear the crown proudly, Nvidia, at least until AMD fires back with its Cayman part in a couple of weeks.

Perhaps HIS is a Top Gun fan, but this company definitely has a need, a need for speed. HIS today announced its 6870 Turbo, a factory overclocked card that gooses the core clockespeed to 920MHz. That's faster than any other HD 6870 card we've seen yet.

In addition to speed, the 6870 Turbo supports Eyefinity technology and comes ready for 3D, provided you're willing to don a pair of funny looking glasses and have a compatbile monitor.

So how much when will it cost and when will it be available? Good questions, both of them, neither of which HIS has yet answered.

Do you prescribe to the philosophy of 'Go big or go home'? Are you the type that overspends on graphics horsepower because, hey, bragging rights carry a value too? Interested in assembling a gaming PC that will be all the envy of everyone on your block? Fantastic, but this isn't the card for you. In fact, Nvidia's new GeForce GT 430 might not even be an appropriate card for your mother, provided she's rocking a 30-inch panel and likes to play Crysis.

What the GeForce GT 430 is good for is giving consumers on a budget an out from feeling depressed about having to settle for onboard graphics. For around $75, the GeForce GT 430 offers plenty of power for your HTPC, and according to Nvidia, will handle today's most popular games too, though don't expect to crank up the visual quality settings and keep things smooth.

All told, however, $75 for a DX11 capable graphics card with HDMI isn't all that bad.

Take a long look at that ATi logo, because it might be one of the last times you see it on any new content. AMD has announced that they are killing ATi.

Now some of you may be thinking "WHAT?!? But I thought ATi was doing well!" No, silly, AMD's graphics division is not dead, only the ATi branding is. Radeon cards will now be called AMD Radeon graphics. Weird stuff, huh? Apparently AMD know best though, as they claim to have conducted extensive research on the matter and found that AMD was a far more recognizable brand to gamers.

At any rate, you might want to keep your old Radeons around, at least for sentimental reasons. Source

Nvidia hands over the reigns as the top dog in graphics to AMD, thanks to recent second quarter domination by ATI.  Nvidia is still learning how to deal with a recent contract loss to Apple, while at the same time, phasing out their chipset business. These things along with simply not competing on the mainstream market with ATI has killed them. 

Maybe they have something up their sleeve, but nowadays even the former die-hard Nvidia fans from recent years are currently sporting ATI graphics cards in their newer builds.  Why?  Because Nvidia has decided to only support all the latest graphics technologies in their overhyped and overpriced graphics cards.  At this point the market share is still pretty close to 50-50, but if Nvidia doesn't start coming around we could see another 3dfx-type fallout in the graphics industry, and none of us want that.

Today Nvidia has released their GeForce GTX 460 card. Based on the new GF104 core as opposed to the cut-down Fermi core of the GTX 480, 470, and 465, this is an all-new die, much smaller and more efficient. This results in significantly lower power draw, so much so that the second PCIe power plug in the GTX 460 is more for insurance than out of necessity, with a TDP just over the single-plug spec of 150W, a bit lower than ATi's lackluster Radeon HD 5830 and about the same as their fantastic Radeon HD 5850. Obviously, this new core allows the power draw to be much lower than that of GF100 parts.

Better still, The GTX 460 costs a mere $200, the same as the Radeon HD 5830 is currently going for. It finally looks like Nvidia has a release that performs at its price and doesn't eat power for lunch.

The GTX 460 has two versions at launch. The cut-down 768MB version has a 192-bit interface connected to GDDR5 and 24ROPs. The 1GB version has a 256-bit GDDR5 bus and 32ROPs. Otherwise the two are identical (yay for naming confusion!).

Early reviews of the two products are very heartening, with the 768MB 460 acing the 5830 at the same price and with lower power consumption (something that, to be honest, needed to happen because the 5830 just sucks) and the 1GB 460 being right on par with the 465 (again, something that needed to happen, because the 465 sucks as well).

"BFG Technologies today announced their exit from the graphics card category. The company will continue to sell their line of BFG Tech power supplies as well as their Deimos gaming notebooks and Phobos gaming systems.

'After eight years of providing innovative, high-quality graphics cards to the market, we regret to say that this category is no longer profitable for us, although we will continue to evaluate it going forward', said John Slevin, chairman of BFG Technologies. 'We will continue to provide our award-winning power supplies and gaming systems, and are working on a few new products as well. I’d like to stress that we will continue to provide RMA support for our current graphics card warranty holders, as well as for all of our other products such as power supplies, PCs and notebooks.'

BFG will continue to offer RMA, telephone and email support for qualified BFG Tech graphics card warranty holders, but will no longer be bringing new graphics card products to market. source