Graphics Cards - Page 269

OCHeaven have what they claim is the first 3Dmark tests on the Radeon HD4890. The results are based on testing done by an unnamed source and are, as of this writing, yet to be verified.

The test system had an Intel Core i7 930 and 3 GB of RAM, although other details are not known.

The scores that the HD 4890 achieved (P10996 in 3DMark Vantage and 16096 in 3DMark06) are from testing with an Unknown and possibly beta driver.

Although the 3DMark06 score is close to the GTX285 the 3DMark Vantage score still lags behind due to the PhysX boost from the GPU.

I will be fun to see where these cards end up once officially released.

Read more here

All sorts of information popped up around the web today concerning ATI's upcomming Radeon HD 4890 GPU.

Based on conversations between ATI and PCGH, it seems that ATI might be thinking about a Radeon HD 4890 X2 to compete with the GTX 285.

With NVIDIA getting ready to launch the GTS 250, ATI is slashing prices on its HD

4870 and HD 4850 cards. The price cuts will drop the 4870 down to $149 and the 4850 will go down to $129. If the price cuts hit later in the week, this should really give NVIDIA a run for its money.



ATI's dual GPU offerings, the HD4850 X2 and HD4870 X2, don't seem to be getting the price cut at all and the HD 4830 will also stay the same price. The HD 4830 will soon be replaced by the upcomming RV740, which is also expected to launch along side the RV790 chip.

More importantly is that this adds some evidence to earlier rumors on the Radeon HD 4890 launch date of April 6.

If everything holds true, the next month or so will prove very interesting for everyone in the video card market. Both desktop and mobile users are getting new chips and with lots of new numbers flying around, the fight for title of king will surely be a heated one.

Zotac has confirmed its latest addition to the GT200 family of cards, the GTX 285 Infinity Edition.

While the card doesn't feature any additional memory, it does come with a custom all-copper water block with 3/8" fittings.

The folks over at GPU Cafe were told by Asus that their new W90 notebook will launch on February 23rd. What makes it so special that that the W90 will feature the upcomming ATI Mobility Radeon 4870X2 GPU. The mobile version of the 4870X2 wll have clock speeds of 600 MHz on the core and 900 MHz for the memory.

EVGA is now giving its registered NVIDIA SLI graphics card owners a free treat, something EVGA refers to as the SLI Enhancement Patch. As many of you know, for SLI to work in an optimized state for various games and 3D applications, "SLI profiles" at the software level are required. As these are unique to many game titles and the like, updating the profiles listing is required and this is something NVIDIA don't get onto straight away.

It looks like the new Atom with the Integrated GPU will still only be a DX9 part.

The GPU that will be going side by side with the 32nm Atom pineview will be none other than the GMA950, the same underperforming GPU that you find in the 945GSE chipset but shrunk down to 45nm and with a higher clock.

The new Pineview, although it will not have the most amazing graphics will feature an IMC (Internal Memory Controller) that will be paired up with the GPU. This will allow up to DDR2 800 memory.

Overall the new Atom when combined with the Tiger Point chipset will reduce the total kit package by 70% and Total TDP for the package by 50%.

This all may be moot as I am sure part of the agreement to license SLI for the DX580SO included some ION agreements.

Read more here at Fudzilla.

NVIDIA has just sent us news that it has recently seen explosive hardware sales growth of its GeForce 3D Vision 3D glasses.

It seems like NVIDIA are playing the same old and boring brand name games again.

Now that the 9.1 Catalyst drivers have been released, german website ATI Forum has dug into the driver information to see what they can pluck from it in the way of future plans; what they discovered is that the world's first 40nm GPU (codenamed RV740) will come in the form of not one, but two SKUs, now known as the Radeon HD 4730 and HD 4750.

The economic downturn hurt GPU sales in the final quarter of 2008.
At least that is the case according to Jon Peddie Research.

The study followed the sale of Graphics chips over the course of eight years and compared them. Jon Peddie Research did not limit the study to Desktop GPUs but also covered the entire range of products that ship with a Graphics Chip.

The study found that Q4 2008 suffered an incredible 34% drop over Q3 and 2% drop over Q4 2007.

They also broke down the numbers by manufacturer finding that out of the big three (AMD, nVidia and Intel) nVidia had the largest drop when comparing year to year and AMD was behind comparing Q3 to Q4.

Read more here.

MSI has just introduced the latest edition to its gaming notebook series, dubbed the GT627. This is MSI's first model to use NVIDIA's GeForce 9800M GS GPU for unprecedented mobile graphics performance.

nVidia is going back to its roots; at least according to Fudzilla they are.

The green team is going to try and simplify the way their cards are built. This means cleaner PCBs single phase power regulation and fewer components on the card.

This means the cards will be less expensive to build, run cooler (and use less power too), and still will be able to maintain performance. This new direction comes after many years of simple refreshes and renaming. Maybe we can expect great things from nVidia in the not too distant future.

Time will tell of the lower cost of manufacturing will translate to the consumer.

Read more at Fudzilla

For those of you wondering when exactly the new GeForce GTX 295 and 285 graphics cards will see the light of day, the wraps will be taken off the dual-GPU weilding beheamoth this coming thursday (when CES'09 kicks off), whilst the refined 55nm single GPU GTX 285 card won't show up until a week later; January 15 to be exact.

Some images popped up yesterday of XFX's first dip into the ATI pool with a couple non-reference graphics cards based on the HD 4850 and HD 4870, which we covered here.

Further to initial reports in Q4'08, more evidence has come forth which supports NVIDIA's intent to move all of its lower/mid-range GPU lineups across to the GTxxx naming scheme.

A channel vendor of Acer and Packard Bell PCs has advertised three of its latest desktop PCs with entry-level GeForce graphics cards under the new naming; a GeForce G100 which carries 512MB memory, GT120 with 1GB and GT130 which supposedly carries a whopping 1.5GB memory (surely they're mistaken here?!).

We've heard and seen a lot about NVIDIA's upcoming GeForce 295 dual-GPU graphics card recently, but little has been mentioned about the next flagship single-GPU offering; the GeForce GTX 285. We know that the card is based on NVIDIA's refined 55nm G200b core and apparently it runs identical specs to the existing GTX 280s, but will come in with higher reference clock speeds yet eats less power.

Now we get to see a bit more about how this relates in real world terms with ChipHell scoring two slides from NVIDIA which show a few of the GTX 285's specs and some benchmark results of the card up against an existing GTX 280 on a Core i7 platform across a series of gaming tests.

We recently saw a swarm of pre-release tidbits hit the web about NVIDIA's upcoming dual-GPU monster, the GTX 295. However, there were a fair number of restrictions in place as to just what was allowed to be revealed about the card's characteristics and performance at the time.

XFastest does away with all that and goes the full hog, getting hold of not one, but two GTX 295s, pairing them up on a Core i7 965 EE based system and slamming out some Quad SLI results using 3DMark Vantage.

Sapphire Technology is today finally taking the covers off its ATOMIC Edition Radeon HD 4870 X2 graphics card and boy, does it pack a punch!