It’s officially the end of an era. AMD has confirmed what has been rumored for a few months now, that it plans to drop the ATI brand name. AMD says it’s doing so because consumers are more familiar with AMD, so it makes no sense to try to keep pushing the ATI brand. Pour one out for ATI when you have a moment.

AMD told Thinq that, in its surveys of consumers, they found that brand awareness of the AMD name was far and away more thorough than brand awareness of ATI. Adios, ATI.

You could see the changeover for months now. The company’s Catalyst drivers for its Radeon series of graphics cards switched over to AMD branding a few months ago, and if you were to buy a Radeon 6000 series graphics card you’d see AMD and not ATI on the box.

Nothing beyond the name changes, so you can expect the same sort of experience as you had before: pretty decent hardware often held back by relatively lackluster drivers. Sticky top right hand corner glitch, anyone?

AMD has released the latest version (10.12) of its Catalyst Control Center driver suite, and there’s something missing: ATI branding! You’ll recall that AMD had decided to phase out the ATI brand name on its Radeon graphics cards (AMD bought ATI several years ago), with the thinking that “Radeon” means more to consumers than “ATI.” Starting with this driver suite, ATI is nowhere to be found.

Version 10.12 of the Catalyst Control Center (actually called Catalyst Control Center 2) looks awfully like Nvidia’s driver software, which is good news. I don’t think too many people really enjoyed the byzantine layout of previous CCC releases. It worked, but it certainly wasn’t user-friendly.

AMD says CCC2 “enables a simplified user experience to help users get the most out of their AMD product.” As long as I can disable Crossfire with the tick of a box I’m happy. Good Old Games don’t tend to work well in dual GPU mode.

The release notes of the new release can be found here.

Do we mourn the loss of the ATI brand name? I’m not sure what the official community reaction is here.

AMD mentioned in its earnings call that its next-generation graphics cards will be released next week. Details are non-existent, so don’t even bother asking. I do know that the codename of the architecture is “Northern Islands.”

I will also assume that these will be the first cards to drop the ATI branding, going full-on AMD.

So we’ll be looking at, I’d guess, the AMD Radeon 6XXX.

Again, there’s no details quite yet, as this was merely mentioned by CEO Dirk Meyer during the earnings call.

“We will be launching our second-generation DX11 graphics offerings next week,” said Meyer, before adding that the launch will be accompanied by “launch activities.” Hmm?

More as it pops up, of course.

ATI, we hardly knew ye. Word on the street is that AMD, which bought ATI for a cool $5.4 billion some four years ago, will phase out the ATI name later this year. Apparently AMD’s research indicates that people prefer the AMD name to the ATI name, but that, above that, the name that really sells is Radeon. Goodbye ATI Radeon Pro, hello AMD Radeon Pro.

Is this a big deal? Eh, kinda. I honestly could give a toss what AMD calls the GPUs so long as they perform admirably. (And I’m writing this post on a PC with a Radeon Pro 5970 on board that I shelled out quite a bit of money for!) I guess it’s more of a nostalgia thing. “Oh man, they’re phasing out the ATI name? Bummer.”

Perhaps AMD will use this as an opportunity to create drivers that don’t cause the community to meltdown!

Now, why is this happening? AMD’s research shows that, well, the ATI name doesn’t mean a whole bunch these days. Side-by-side, people have more confidence in AMD GPUs when referred to as “AMD” rather than “ATI.”

I’d like to meet the person who’s willing to buy an AMD Radeon but not an ATI Radeon. But apparently these people exist.

AMD has also found that the, truth be told, it’s really the Radeon brand name that means anything, particularly when compared to the name Nvidia.

Wall of text to explain this: beginning with the next batch of GPUs, which should be released later this year, you’ll be looking at benchmarks of the AMD Radeon XXXX and not the ATI Radeon.

Perhaps a sad day for all the ATI fans in the crowd, but at the end of the day, so long as the cards work well AMD could call them the Super-Duper AMD Graphics Processing Unit for all I care.

This is just a heads-up for any ATI folks out there looking to add a little anti-aliasing to your StarCraft II-ing. ATI has released an updated driver, version 10.7a, that includes a hotfix that enables forced AA for the game. You have to activate AA inside the Catalyst Control Thingamajig outside of the game.

End transmission.

How long did Blizzard spend developing StarCraft II? Since 2003, give or take some time here and there when the company needed all hands on deck for World of Warcraft. So you’d think that would be enough time to figure out how to implement anti-aliasing into the graphics engine, right? You see where I’m going with this.

Blizzard has come underunder fire from certain sections of the PC gaming crowd for the lack of in-game anti-aliasing. Does a game like StarCraft II really need AA? Eh… debatable. I mean, you absolutely want to see it in there, no question. It is 2010 after all. But will the lack of AA kill your enjoyment of the game? Probably not, no.

Nvidia’s latest software gives gamers the ability to force AA, but this comes at a performance hit.

ATI, on the other hand, offers no such option. At least not yet.

After evaluating our options, our engineering team opted not to provide AA support for StarCraft II within the Catalyst Control Center, even though the competition has included AA support in their driver at launch.

We are committed to making AA perform at an acceptable level before we release it to our customers. We will continue to work with Blizzard on this matter and hope to offer our customers an acceptable AA solution at a later date.

This was followed up, a few hours later, with a tweet from ATI that says a hotfix, one that would offer some sort of AA implementation, is on the way.

So there we have it. No AA from Blizzard, a brute force option offered by Nvidia, and ATI saying, “One moment, please…”

As the world turns, I suppose.

Have you launched VLC today? If so then you’ll already know that it has been updated to version 1.1.0. The biggest feature in this version is the addition of GPU decoding for Windows (Vista and 7 only) and Linux users. That is, you can use that fancy GPU of yours to help decode that 1080p MKV you’ve got there, leaving your CPU with enough room to breathe, or whatever. Fair warning: if you’re on Windows, hope you’ve got an nVidia GPU…

That’s right: on Windows, the new feature only supports nVidia GPUs. The release notes say this is because ATI‘s Windows drivers don’t work properly.

NB: so far, on Windows, VideoLAN is quite sad to be forced to recommend nVidia GPU, until ATI fixes their drivers on Windows, and until VLC developer get access to some Intel hardware supporting GPU decoding.

You’ll also notice that clever little dig at Intel. How you can expect some rubbish Intel GPU to decode video, I don’t know, but there you go.

Mac users, of course, are totally left out in the cold vis-à-vis GPU-assisted decoding.

Remember back when anti-mac fanboys use to say that “the Mac doesn’t have gaming, it’s not 1337”. Then Apple entered the gaming world as a noob, and now look, OS X is running Steam.

It got off to a pretty good start, but recently Valve’s Rob Barris said that ATI, NVIDIA and Apple are working hard to increase performance even further. “Performance is going to improve as drivers are updated,” said Barris and he expects “modest improvements in short term and larger ones in longer term”. As far as when, he asserted, “No, I can’t put dates on them.”

It’s great to know that Apple’s gaming focus isn’t just into the iOS platform. I can’t wait for Counter Strike, Team Fortress and Portal to download.

Damn you, Sapphire. Three weeks ago I bought your vanilla Radeon 5970, and now you release the Radeon 5970 4G TOXIC Edition? What a load of bunk. Fastest video card on the planet, you say? Well I say FE$%Fxtgredth.

I’m not hating on the technology of the card itself. I mean, how can you get mad at 4GB of on-board memory and a 900MHz core, plus a special Arctic Cooling cooler? My card has 2GB of memory and a 725 MHz core—it might as well be some mud and sticks in there.

It’s basically a beefed up ATI Radeon 5970, benchmarks of which are all over the Internet. Spoiler: it’s really fast.

No word on how much it’ll cost, but you’ve got to be looking at at least $650.

The GX640 comes standard with the previously mentioned Core i5, an ATI Radeon HD5850 with 1GB of DDR5, and 4GB of system memory. It’s packing a 15.4 inch screen, so it’s relatively portable, and the 9-cell battery should help with battery life. The Gx640 is available now at Amazon.com with an MSRP of $1099.

From the press release:

CITY OF INDUSTRY, CA – April 21, 2010 – MSI Computer Corp., a leading manufacturer of computer hardware products and solutions, is proud to announce the availability of the new 15.4-inch GX640 gaming notebook. The GX640 comes locked and loaded with Intel’s powerful new Core i5 processor and the ATI Radeon HD5850 graphics card with 1 GB DDR5. It is the gaming notebook of choice for Evil Geniuses, the number one ranked professional gaming team in North America.

“When you’re competing at the absolute highest level, your equipment has a huge effect on your performance,” said Alexander Garfield, Executive Director of Evil Geniuses. “Our professional gamers stay on top of the competition with the help of the world’s finest gaming Notebooks from MSI Computer. They give us the edge we need to bring home championship after championship.”

GX640’s new GPU supports DirectX 11 graphics, future-proofing the notebook for the next generation of games and 3D graphics. Its Core i5 processor improves battery life by as much as 15% and features Intel’s new Turbo Boost technology which can increase overall performance by as much as 30%, ensuring smooth gameplay.

The new lightweight notebook is housed in a stylish brushed aluminum case with fire engine red accents The GX640 features a raised chiclet keyboard, for increased accuracy and comfort while typing, and clearly marked W, A, S and D keys for quick response while gaming.

The GX640 ships with a 15.4-inch LCD screen with 1680×1050 resolution, 4 GB of DDR3 memory, a 500GB hard drive 7200 rpm, a 9-cell battery, Bluetooth connectivity and Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit.

The GX640 is priced at $1099.99 and is available now at Amazon and will be available on Newegg later this month.

The ATI Radeon HD 5970 is essentially two 5870s slapped together, but underclocked a little bit so as not to melt a hole through your carpet (but will melt a hole through your bank account~!) Asus saw that and was like, “Pfft, wait till you see what we’ve come up with.” It’s called the Asus Ares 5970, a true-to-life dual 5870 solution that doesn’t downclock nothin’ for nobody. Slight problem: it might not actually come out here in the U.S.

This card keeps the two 5870 GPUs running at full speed, which should improve performance more than a little bit, “easily [surpassing]” 3D Mark scores of a standard 5970.

The extra power literally requires extra power, requiring a third auxilary power connector just to keep the thing plucking along. Asus says it still comes in under the magic 300W mark, so no worries there. (A plain ol’ 5970 “officially” clocks in at under 300W, but Asus says it’s more like 260W—more than enough breathing room for its Ares 5970 to operate in.)

You’d probably need an Extreme Edition Core i7, plus the new Rampage motherboard, to most effectively take advanateg of this kind of power. And to what end, so you can play Fallout 3 again, but with 12 extra frames per second?

Meh, who am I kidding, I’d be all over an extra 12 frames per second. Gotta have a hobby!

Last week at PAX East, Nvidia showed off for the first time its GTX 480. Reviews were kind, but noted that the card runs at approximately 8 million degrees, and that the performance isn’t as crazy as you’d expect for the $500 you’re going to pay—an ATI Radeon 5870 is nearly as good, for $100 cheaper. So, make your own decisions! That’s part of the fun of PC gaming: spending weeks on Newegg worrying over motherboard combinations and the like. Anyhow, ATI has a new card on the block today, the Radeon HD 5870 Eyfinitiy 6 Edition.

You already know what Eyefinity is: it allows you to hook up your PC to several monitors using only one GPU. This edition of the card also adds 1GB of memory, bringing it up to a solid 2GB. I think that’s as much memory as my laptop has!

TomsHardware ran the card through its paces, and the general consensus is this: really good card, but Eyefinity isn’t so great for gaming right now. You’d need monitors with incredibly thin bezels, lest good parts of the action be cut off. Samsung has a new monitor en route that will, indeed, be super thinned bezel’d.

I don’t know, speaking as an average gamer, it seems like Nvidia and ATI are grasping at straws trying to come up with ways to make their cards unique. Nvidia has 3D Vision, which I personally don’t think is all that and a bag of chips. Maybe my eyes are broken, I don’t know, but the 3D never seems “real,” you know? And Eyefinity—I barely have enough room on my desk for the one 24-inch monitor I have on it now—six monitors is totally out of the question.

Again, as an average gamer, I’m more than happy to see Nvidia and ATI continue to fight over raw power rather than all these little side things.

As long as both companies are healthy, then I think PC gamers will be fine. The last thing we need is for one company to dominate in such a way that it makes the other guy nothing more than an also-ran.

And now I head back to Newegg, looking to upgrade a few components! The Intel Core i7 930 looks pretty great, but then I’d need a new motherboard! Woo!

We don’t know a whole lot about the HD 5970 yet, but if the buzz is true it’ll be the fastest single GPU card available on the market. NVidia holds the current title for the fastest GPU solution. Hopefully the brains at ATI will come up with something to challenge NVidia on that front as well. Of course, the new cards aren’t available for sale yet, but you can pretty much assume they’re going to run about $100 more then the “standard” HD 5970 cards.

[via Tom's Hardware]

Man alive, how great would it be to be rich? You could afford crazy things like, I don’t know, new shoes, healthy food, and six 20-inch monitors to play Modern Warfare 2 with. That’s the dream.

So as you can see, the game scales quite well across all six screens—the only “glitch” occurs when text gets cut off at the bezel of the TV.

ATI’s Eyefinity technology makes this magic possible. The 5800 series of cards (and up, presumably) allow you to span compatible games across several screens. It’s not something you’re going to find at a Best Buy demo area or whatever, so people were freaking out while they passed by.

Pretty neat, I thought.

AMD is finally looking to get into the netbook game for real. Forget about the thin-and-light NEO chipset that’s been out for a while—we’re talking about an honest, netbook-specific chipset based on the company’s Fusion initiative that’ll blend power-sipping CPUs with ATI graphics. The platform will draw between 10 and 15 watts of power and will be designed for screens 12 inches and smaller.

With all these netbooks coming out now that are powered by Intel Atom CPUs paired with either Broadcom HD graphics accelerators or NVIDIA ION GPUs, it appears that AMD must finally be thinking to itself, “These guys from all these different companies have to pair this CPU with that GPU or add this accelerator because Intel’s GPUs stink. We have our own CPUs and our own powerful ATI GPUs. We could do this much more easily and cheaply.”

AMD’s Nigel Dessau told InternetNews.com the following:

“It will have a good processor integrated with graphics, so you won’t need the Ion graphics to give it half-decent performance… If we’d had a part, we’d have been in this space. We didn’t have a part so we went and worked on a part for the thin and light space. The plan is to come to market next year with a Fusion part that fits it nicely in a netbook type thing.”

With the impending confusion that’ll be caused (or is already being caused) by all the pairings between Intel, NVIDIA, and others, AMD is in a prime position to come in with a few netbook chipsets comprised of its own AMD CPUs and respectable ATI GPUs, price them $50 less than comparable Intel offerings, and watch the sales roll in. Unfortunately by 2011, who knows what state the netbook market will be in? AMD can’t just show up and say, “Look! We have a new platform that’s better than the Intel + ION pairings from last summer!”

The company’s got a big opportunity here. Netbooks aren’t going anywhere anytime soon, but people are expecting to be able to do more and more with them—an area where Intel has purposely under delivered in order to try to convince consumers to purchase more expensive CPUs. As it turns out, most consumers don’t really care how fast the CPU is. They just want to watch HD videos and play games. If anyone can deliver that experience in a single, integrated, inexpensive package, it’s AMD.

[HardwareCentral via Liliputing]

ATI just released a new, super entry level graphics card that should placate, well, not hardcore gamers, but most regular people. It’s the Radeon 5450. Like other 5000 series cards, it works with Eyefinity, meaning that you can spread the image across several screens, as this image swiped from Tom’s Hardware shows.

The card supports DirectX 11, don’t expect to run Crysis at 1920×1200. (It does run the game at lower resolutions, though.) I don’t even know why I wrote this, since the card isn’t aimed at gamers. You want to game, get yourself a Radeon 5850 or 5970. (I’m unfamiliar with Nvidia’s naming schemes.)

Turns out the card isn’t too shabby at all if you’re looking to build a home theater PC. The 5450 works wonders for that, pushing 1080p video just fine.

I don’t know, it’s an everyday card for everyday people at an everyday price: $50.

Details are scant at the moment, and Fudzilla is quoting unnamed “industry sources” so take this news with a grain of salt even though it makes sense and probably isn’t that big of a stretch anyway.

The site is also positing that the ATI chip may be of the 28-nanometer variety but being that next generation consoles are apparently not due from Microsoft and Sony until 2012, GPUs by that time could be invisible and made out of unicorn horns and fueled by Sasquatch DNA for all anybody knows. It could happen!

ATI already won next gen Xbox deal [Fudzilla]

Thanks to John for sending this in.

What’s the matter with AMD? The number two chip maker in the whole world just posted some numbers that don’t reflect too kindly on its performance over the last few months. The big, bad Sunnyvale, Calif.-based corp lost $416 million last quarter; about $195 million of that was related to a corporate spinoff (see: GlobalFoundries). When put into scary percentages, AMD’s sales fell off 21 percent. Meanwhile, Intel, what with its Core 2 Duo and, more importantly, its Atom, continues to hum along nicely, expecting sales to rise for this same quarter. So what gives, AMD?

A few things, it looks like. One, you can’t ignore the fact that we’ve been in an economic funk for the past several months. People can’t as easily drop a few hundred dollars on a system pieced together from Newegg parts.

But then why isn’t Intel doing as poorly? Well, if you buy a netbook, those tiny, pointless computers that are all the rage these days (unless your name is “Apple, Inc.”), odds are you’ll find an Intel Atom processor in there. How the Atom compares to AMD’s Nano is the subject of many a message board thread, but message board threads don’t pay the bills.

(Sales of ATI GPUs aren’t doing so great, either, for whatever reason. That’s also not helping AMD’s bottom line now that it owns ATI.)

So, yeah. How about the fight for La Liga this year? Pretty damn interesting.

Photo: Flickr

I’m afraid one of CrunchGear’s shortcomings is a severe lack of contact with disgruntled Taiwanese manufactory workers. That leaves it to places like DailyTech, who thrive on such connections, to get hold of such precious booty. It’s obviously not a final version (my god, look at the case), but the components appear to be final. A new core clocked to 850MHz (capable of more), a gig of GDDR5, and some “tweaks and modifications” that are under investigation, likely to be changes aimed at the chinks in the 4870′s armor.

Expect more in the coming weeks.

A Dutch retailer did briefly list a 5870 X2 in inventory, specifically a Radeon HD5870X2. It seems more likely that a 58XX card will be an entirely new die and core and support DirectX 11, rather than show the refresh specs this mysterious product seems to offer. Perhaps it’s the Radeon HD4995 people have been expecting, which should recapture the top performance spot from NVIDIA? Nobody knows. Meanwhile, here are the specs, from Guru3d:

Memory Type: GDDR5
GPU frequency: 800 MHz
Memory Frequency: 4800 MHz
Interface: PCI-e 16x
RAMDAC: 400 MHz
TV-out: HDMI
DVI: 2 x
Max Resolution: 2560 x 1600 pixels
DirectX: 10.1
HDMI: 1 x HDMI

Sounds hot — like magma.