nvidia

Update: Pricing is live on HP's site. The new Exhiliration Edition starts at $6,600, and that gets you 2GB of 1,600MHz DDR3 RAM, two 160GB 10k hard drives, as well as a separate 1TB drive for storage, along with the other specs previously mentioned. This also appears to be something of a deal, as similar specs from other vendors cost at minimum about $400 more. HP's site says "limited time starting" near the price, which we take to mean the price may go up, not that the hardware is a limited run.

Rather than … Read more

Graphics performance improves rapidly. We can be confident that each new generation of graphics chips will be faster than the previous one, and that AMD and NVIDIA will regularly surpass each other with new product launches. I've been watching this process professionally since 1996, when I began covering graphics technology for Microprocessor Report.

As of today, NVIDIA is on top. The new GeForce GTX 280 is the fastest graphics chip you can get. See the first part of this review for details of the chip itself.

If you can get one, anyway. NVIDIA says boards based on the GeForce GTX 280 and its companion GeForce GTX 260 will be available "in quantity" tomorrow (June 17), but if previous launches are any indication, those quantities won't be enough to satisfy everyone.

And you may not be able to afford one-- a GTX 280 board with 1GB of RAM will likely be priced around $649, while GTX 260 boards with 896MB will go for about $399. (The GTX 280 / 1GB board I tested was made by NVIDIA, so it isn't necessarily representative of commercial products.)

But avid gamers won't be discouraged by these prices. Both AMD and NVIDIA like to point out that an expensive graphics card is a much better investment than a high-end CPU or motherboard if you care about gaming.

The standard of comparison for gaming performance is the number of frames per second that can be rendered for a given combination of screen resolution and quality features... or, conversely, what resolution and features can be used without reducing the frame rate below a playable level.

So in my own testing, I used frame rate as a metric for games that could run acceptably with maximum quality at the maximum resolution of my monitor (1,600 x 1,200 pixels), and quality for other games.

I did my testing with four games:… Read more

Today, NVIDIA officially announces its new GeForce GTX 200 family of graphics processing units (GPUs) and the first two products in the family, the GeForce GTX 280 and the GeForce GTX 260.

The GeForce GTX 280 is the new flagship of NVIDIA's GPU product line, taking over from last year's GeForce 9800 GTX. (The change in the product-name format from "9800 GTX" to "GTX 280" is potentially confusing and doesn't seem that useful to me, but I'm sure we'll get used to it over time. I suppose NVIDIA's other choice was to go with numbers above 10,000, which might have been even worse.)

NVIDIA disclosed the details of these products at an Editor's Day conference in May, and most of the attendees, including myself, received GTX 280 graphics cards for editorial review. These cards are NVIDIA reference boards, not retail products.

I'll be doing this review in multiple parts, each addressing a different aspect of these products and the effects they'll have on the PC graphics market.

First, an overview of the GTX 280 chip itself.

This is a huge chip. NVIDIA won't say exactly how large, and I'm not going to bust open the chip package on my reference board just to find out, but NVIDIA VP of technical marketing Tony Tamasi says… Read more

UPDATE: On Monday, Advanced Micro Devices and Nvidia are launching graphics chips based on distinctly different design philosophies.

Nvidia's GTX 280 and GTX 260 are designed to deliver the biggest performance bang per chip. A so-called "monolithic" approach packs 1.4 billion transistors and 240 processing cores onto one piece of silicon.

(See Peter Glaskowsky's review of the GTX 280.)

AMD's modular approach tends toward less is more: smaller, less power-hungry chips that can be strung together to achieve higher performance. The company plans to implement this strategy with the HD 4850 and HD 4870 … Read more

Nvidia is now firing back at Intel. The world's largest graphics chip maker has responded to Intel's latest statement on the USB 3.0 specification and said chipset maker SiS has also joined the group of companies at odds with Intel.

There are now four companies vying with Intel--all chipset makers: Nvidia, Advanced Micro Devices, Via Technologies, and SiS.

And they're moving quickly to establish their own so-called "host controller" specification. "We're moving fast. We've already staffed it internally. We have resources submitted from all of the companies (Nvidia, AMD, Via, and … Read more

Dean Takahashi sent me an e-mail pointing to a piece he wrote on VentureBeat describing statements Wednesday by Intel's Chief Technical Officer Justin Rattner targeted at NVIDIA. CNET's own Brooke Crothers covered the same story and provides additional background here.

The technology at issue relates to 3D graphics for PCs. All current PC graphics chips use what's called polygon-order rendering. All of the polygons that make up the objects to be displayed are processed one at a time. The graphics chip figures out where each polygon should appear on the screen and how much of it will be visible or obstructed by other polygons.

Ray tracing achieves similar results by working through each pixel on the screen, firing off a "ray" (like a backward ray of light) that bounces off the polygons until it reaches a light source in the scene. Ray tracing produces natural lighting effects but takes a lot more work.

(That's the short version, anyway. For more details, you could dig up a copy of my 1997 book Beyond Conventional 3D. Alas, the book is long since out of print.)

Ray tracing is easily implemented in software on a general-purpose CPU, and indeed, most of the computer graphics you see in movies and TV commercials are generated this way, using rooms full of PCs or blade-server systems.

Naturally, Intel loves ray tracing, and there are people at Intel working to… Read more

Intel issued a statement about USB 3.0, a subject threatening to cause a full-blown controversy among several chipmakers. The company also said it would present a paper on its upcoming "Larrabee" graphics technology in August.

The Intel statement on USB 3.0 is meant to clarify the difference between the basic USB specification and the "host controller specification"--the latter a point of dispute with rivals Advanced Micro Devices and Nvidia. The statement also tries to dispel rumors that Intel is "holding back the specification" from others in the industry.

AMD and Nvidia are claiming that Intel is trying to hijack the specification. … Read more

Sigh. We were growing weary of all this little-laptop news as early as March. Little did we know that the Eee PC, Classmate PC, and HTC Shift were only the tip of the iceberg. This week's headlines were dominated by news from the show floor at Computex 2008 in Taipei.

Asus introduced its 8.9-inch Eee PC 901 and 10-inch Eee PC 1000. Acer launched its low-cost mini-laptop, the Aspire One; our awesome colleagues at CNET UK paid the little guy a visit and shared a series of Aspire One photos. The $399 MSI Wind got a platform (Intel … Read more

UPDATE: AMD and Nvidia aim to wrest control of a crucial PC specification from Intel, arguing that the chip giant is trying to box them out as they move to a new era of faster peripherals.

In play is the USB 3.0 specification, a next-generation high-speed connection standard due in 2009. It is significant not only because all future PCs and devices will use connectors based on the standard but because it will offer 10 times the speed of USB 2.0--used in virtually all PCs introduced in the last few years--or roughly 5 gigabits per second.

Intel formed … Read more