Did Santa give you an AMD Radeon HD 6950 this year? Good news: he actually gave you a 6970! It turns out that with a few clicks of your mouse you can unlock your 6950 so that it runs at 6970 speeds. Nice! → Read More
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.” → Read More
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. → Read More
Nvidia wants to help out you laptop gamers. How nice of them. From now on, the company will release both desktop and mobile drivers at the same time. This isn’t such a big deal for desktop users, what with their fancy GTX 480s, but laptop users won’t have to wait for the Dells and HPs of the world to release updated drivers. Nvidia’s got you covered. → Read More
It seems that a lot of people are moving to a laptop as their primary machine, but that poses a problem for power users who need both mobility and horsepower. Add battery concerns to the pile and you’ve got kind of a conundrum. Fortunately, each new generation of graphics cards provides more power, less battery draw, or both. That’s going on right now with Nvidia, which is adding a bunch of… → Read More
The eternal quandary for system builders has been much less quandarious (to coin a term) for the last year or so. Intel processor, AMD video card — anything else would be uncivilized. AMD’s 48xx series has been the only choice for a while, but the latest products from AMD and NVIDIA are a little less starkly separated.
For around $250 (the mid-high sweet spot), the 4890 and GTX 275 are … → Read More
Things are getting out of control in the 3D modeling business. Models for movies and games have gone from thousands to hundreds of thousands of triangles, and the lighting and shading necessary for them is getting so complicated as to require a whole separate video card. Imagine you’re an animator at Pixar — do you think they made WALL-E on netbooks? No, son. They probably used things we… → Read More
As much as we like the giant-killing 4870 graphics cards from AMD, they have been around for quite a while now. It’s past time when more needs to be done than tape two together and call it “X2.” Luckily, they’ve had the successor to the 4870 in the pipe for a while now, and someone’s just gotten their dirty hands on one. → Read More
If you didn’t already have enough reasons to buy a Radeon 4870 in one of its many forms, well, here’s another one. AMD’s been trying to push sales of its graphics cards, hoping to lower inventory and get a little dough, maybe to offset the enormous loss they posted this last quarter.
Their strategy was to lower the 512MB 4850 to ~$120, and its big brother the giant-killer 4870 to an incredible… → Read More
It wasn’t so very long ago that the 4870 was the king of the hill. They offer it all the way up to 2GB right now, but 512MB should suit anybody shopping in the mid range. And $150 (with the $15 mail-in rebate) is an absolutely excellent price for this card. If I weren’t completely broke right now, I’d buy one myself. Maybe one of you guys could buy two and I’ll pay you back… → Read More
Video card technology seems to compete with CPU technology, both of them continuing to obey Moore’s law, and becoming faster and faster with each iteration. Many manufacturers have also taken to increasing the amount of memory on their existing cards to make them run better. Most the time, this results in at least noticeably better performance, as we’ve seen. → Read More
Nvidia, not known for being forthcoming (but perhaps no more than any other tech company), is apparently doing a few sites pretty dirty in relation to its upcoming line of graphics cards. Evidence has been published that shows Nvidia is rebranding some seriously old cards for new sales, which is pretty disingenuous. Unfortunately, sites who have made a stink about it are finding themselves SOL for… → Read More
NVIDIA’s ice-cream sandwich-looking dual-GPU answer to AMD’s dual-GPU 4870 X2 doesn’t excel, but doesn’t disappoint, either. Although the GeForce GTX 280 has recently surpassed the 4870 in performance with its new drivers, the architecture of the GTX 295 limits the capabilities and makes it just barely eke ahead of AMD, and even then it’s with a price premium. At $500… → Read More
In what has become pretty much a standard move by graphics card makers, NVIDIA has revealed that its new fastest card will be… two of its old fastest cards glued together. It should be said that this is far from an ineffective approach: the 9800GX2 annihilated everything when it came out last year and the 4870X2 is the king of the hill right now on the price/performance bit. The GTX295 will… → Read More
This is exactly what I feared might happen when I heard Apple was moving to a full NVIDIA solution, complete with the faulty parts that caused so many other mobile setups to croak. A very thorough article at the Inquirer, based on analysis of a new MacBook Pro teardown by parties who wish to remain anonymous, shows that the solder bumps used in at least their test MBP are in fact the infamous… → Read More
The video card business pendulum has had its swing into AMD territory, but bit by bit NVIDIA is making its comeback after an embarrassing early last generation. This time it’s not more frames per second, but favorable alliances which are gaining ground for the graphics giant: EA and 2K Games (creators of Bioshock) have both agreed to use NVIDIA’s PhysX technology to drive their physics… → Read More
Boy oh boy is this a sweet deal. This eVGA GeForce 260 is one of the newer ones, revised with more stream processors than the original, already a powerhouse. It should handle the included (register to get it, bleh) Far Cry 2 with ease. It’s a totally solid card and at $250 it’s a steal, even with AMD competitive right now. If you’re in the market, I’d jump on this right… → Read More
I love this. Back in the day before it was AMD’s Radeon vs. NVIDIA’s GeForce, it was Riva’s TNT vs. 3DFX’s Voodoo. At that stage there were serious differences and advantages, and if I remember correctly, the Voodoo3 came out as Riva was ascendant, and was competitive. The Voodoo5, implementing hardware full-screen anti-aliasing, was an interesting card but was seriously… → Read More
I’ve been trumpeting Radeon superiority in this video card generation for months, but it seems that the seesaw is tipping the other way now and NVIDIA is back on their game. Doubtless the cost-for-performance of the 48xx series early on caused NVIDIA to panic and drop prices, but now that the platforms have matured a little bit, drivers have been updated, and new games are being tested, it… → Read More
Every so often, hardware makers strike out in a new direction, improving their product in an almost random manner — double the shader processors! stick two cards together! — and sometimes it actually has good results. The big move happening right now is a vast increase in the amount of RAM available to the video card, even though that’s not really what’s limiting game… → Read More
A couple weeks ago we posted about allegations of widespread solder failure in NVIDIA graphics cards. This is further confirmation of that, as a study done at my alma mater comparing high-lead (90% lead, 10% tin) and eutectic (60% lead, 40% tin) found that under controlled circumstances, “…plastic energy produced in the high-lead layer is about 100 times larger than in the eutectic… → Read More
NVIDIA’s “abnormal” number of GPU failures have been the subject of much discussion and speculation during the last couple months. The culprit seems to have been the high-lead solder, which everybody rightly assumed NVIDIA would abandon — after all, it’s cost the company hundreds of millions in direct costs and probably far more in lost sales, lost brand credibility… → Read More
The video card scene right now is like watching a boxing match. AMD dealt NVIDIA a solid shot to the face with the 4870 and 4850, causing NVIDIA to lower their prices in an evasive maneuver. NVIDIA has responded by throwing cards at the budget segment under $75. AMD of course disparaged this move, saying it was “quick and dirty,” and said something I feel is insightful: “If you have… → Read More
SLI rendering has gained a lot of popularity lately, even to the point where people are making SLI rigs of pre-SLI’ed cards like the 9800GX2 and the 4870X2. The problem is that drivers and motherboards aren’t really set up to take advantage of two cards. Sure, it works a lot better than one card, but Hydra feels that it’s time mobos got an integrated SLI controller that works out… → Read More
I’ve been saying this a lot this year: it’s a good time to be in the market for a video card! NVIDIA and AMD are firing volley after volley of significant improvements and price reductions. Although NVIDIA’s on-GPU physics processing is compelling, AMD’s new 4870 X2 (essentially two of the impressive 4870 cards stuck together) provides an insane amount of power for the… → Read More
Son, I remember the days when chips were 55 meters! Ain’t no one ever even heard of a nano back then. Had troops o’ monkeys cartin’ ice packs to and from the walk-in freezer just to keep that machine from meltin’ down and burying us all in hot copper — dag nabbit! Seriously, though. Nvidia’s newest, fastest cards are being done on a 55nm process, which allows… → Read More
You may remember Matrox. They were a significant competitor back in the days when the graphics card scene was TNT2 vs. Voodoo3. The dark horse was always Matrox, whose dual-display-oriented cards always perplexed and intrigued me. I still don’t use more than one monitor but it’s far more common these days, with people like our own Doug, who is rocking I believe four monitors at this… → Read More
I could tell you about the list of improvements as long as my arm, including vastly increased memory bandwidth, 65nm fabrication, and huge increases in shader and thread counts. I could bore you with more technical specs and statistics. But I think what you really need to know is that it runs Bioshock at 2560×1600 with 4x anti-aliasing and 8x anisotropic filtering at nearly 60fps. If… → Read More
So you’ve got this big, powerful video card stuck to your computer, just sitting there on idle unless you’re playing a game or rendering something. Why not put it to work? Nvidia has made it possible to take advantage of the carefully engineered parallel architecture of today’s graphics cards through its CUDA (Complete Unified Device Architecture). Macs have missed out, though… → Read More
Just don’t try to play any games with it. I thought this was worth mentioning since people have complained of the cost of DX10 cards. Well, now you can get one for 50 clams. Of course, for that amount of cash you’re probably getting 64 megs of RAM (they don’t specify), which is almost enough to run Daikatana. But if you’ve got it set up right, you’ll be getting… → Read More
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