graphics

Advanced Micro Devices said Wednesday it expects in the fourth quarter to take a sizable write-down for the declining value of intangible assets related to its $5.4 billion acquisition of graphics chipmaker ATI Technologies.

AMD, in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing, said it doesn't yet know the exact size of the write-down but expects it to be "material"--or in other words, substantial--when it concludes its review.

The chipmaker said it's planning to write off the value it assigned to the ATI acquisition that was above the actual value of ATI's assets, otherwise … Read more

Monday Nvidia was trumpeting its two newest mobile GPUs, the GeForce 8800M GTX and GeForce 8800M GTS, as a "gamer's wishes come true." The two graphics cards are now the company's highest-end options for mobile gaming, and Nvidia claims they are the world's fastest notebook GPUs.

Key features on the GeForce 8800M series include both DirectX 10 and DirectX 9 compatibility, so you can make the most of the newest games as well as your old favorites. The graphics processors also include the company's PureVideo HD engine for playback of high-definition video and PowerMizer … Read more

Nvidia is hosting a weekend-long party to celebrate the release of Electronic Arts' Crysis, and gamers from around the San Francisco Bay Area are spending all hours competing for prizes and respect in a desolate warehouse at the former Alameda Naval Air Station.

Several hundred gamers are expected to attend and compete in tournaments playing Crysis, Team Fortress 2, and Madden NFL '08. Nvidia also unveiled a new processor for notebooks during the event at the Area 51 Events Center, which included a look at the state of the PC gaming industry.

For gamers who run out of steam, the … Read more

As rival AMD was preparing to snap up graphics chipmaker ATI Technologies, Intel was considering topping AMD's offer or going after Nvidia, according to one of the company's top executives.

In an interview with The Inquirer, Pat Gelsinger, senior vice president and general manager of Intel's digital enterprise group, said Intel looked "pretty closely" at making a play for Nvidia or ATI, the two largest graphics chip companies in the world. Obviously, that never happened, as AMD closed its acquisition of ATI last year and Nvidia continues on as a standalone company.

Intel had some … Read more

AppleInsider has reported that more than a few owners of the new shiny iMacs are experiencing freezing problems.

When the problem occurs, the system will look and behave as if it's running but is totally unresponsive to any touching of the controls, according to the report. Some suspect foul play by the new ATI Radeon HD graphics card, as most instances occur when playing games or running any video-intensive tasks.

So far Apple is aware of the problem but has yet to release a permanent fix for it. Desperate users have tried to re-install older Mac drivers with mixed … Read more

It appears that Intel still has some work to do in getting its act together on PC graphics.

New drivers for the company's 965GM chipset, found in many notebooks and midrange desktops, still don't deliver the uniform performance increases promised earlier this year, according to testing by CNET Labs. My colleague Julie Rivera benchmarked three games on a PC with both the older drivers and the newer ones, and concluded that while some improvements could be detected, the new drivers don't do nearly enough to improve performance across multiple games.

Integrated graphics are the budget-friendly way of … Read more

Back in mid-August, Intel's Nick Knupffer made a promise to casual 3D gamers by suggesting that a new driver update would give systems that use the Intel G965 integrated graphics chipset a much-needed performance boost. I was highly skeptical of this claim, but wanted to put Intel's claims to the test.

To test Intel's claims, I chose an Acer TravelMate 4720-6727 laptop, which uses a 2GHz Core 2 Duo T7300 CPU, 1GB of RAM, an integrated 965GM Express graphic chipset with 384MB memory allocated, and running Windows XP Professional SP2. While this hardware combination is not the … Read more

As more or less expected, AMD announced the availability of a new ATI graphics card today, the Radeon HD 2900 Pro. The announcement came with no pricing, nor any specific clock speeds, although the general assumption is that the Pro is a cheaper, slightly slower version of the $399 Radeon HD 2900 XT that came out earlier this year. The press release cites 1GB and 512MB variations of the Pro card, as well as 9-inch and 12-inch versions, depending on the fan and heatsink assembly.

Our hope is that the HD 2900 Pro will finally deliver the midrange, next-generation 3D … Read more

With the next two generations of Intel's chips set in place, the company is looking forward to a low-power future.

So said Intel CEO Paul Otellini in his keynote address kicking off the Intel Developer Forum at San Francisco's Moscone Center on Tuesday. Intel will launch the server and high-end desktop versions of its Penryn generation of chips on November 12, in line with previous reports to expect those chips before the Thanksgiving holiday. And Intel has also completed the design for Nehalem, a more radical overhaul of the company's chip blueprints.

The more interesting news was … Read more