October 22nd, 2008 by
Filed under: Laptops
Now that NVIDIA’s GeForce 9400M has made its debut in Apple’s new MacBooks, Technical Marketing Director Nick Stam says that five major notebook vendors are planning to ship systems with the chipset — though we don’t know if that includes Apple or not. Stam expects NVIDIA will carve out 30 percent of the integrated graphics market for itself, partly by improving other experiences besides games — Google Earth, photo editing, day-to-day video encoding, and other activities performed by people who use keys besides W, A, S, and D. Frankly, we’re just thankful we’ve evolved past the days when we needed a 19-inch monster to perform high-impact 3D tasks without sacrificing to the sinister gods of screen tearing.
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Posted in nvidia, geforce, market share, MarketShare, integrated, chipset, laptops, notebooks, integrated graphics, IntegratedGraphics, NvidiaGeforce9400M, 9400M, Geforce9400M, geforce 9400m, nick stam, nvidia geforce 9400m, nvidiageforce | No Comments »
October 16th, 2008 by
Filed under: Gaming
Not like NVIDIA really needed to waste the ink here, but it has decided to hover under the spotlight a bit more by officially introducing its GeForce 9400M GPU. Yeah, the same one Apple made official on its behalf yesterday. The single-chip design features 16 parallel processing cores, 54GFLOPs of processing power and promises 5x the graphics power over Intel’s Centrino 2. In other words, this thing will come a lot closer to handling Crysis in a satisfactory manner than that lowly integrated set you’re probably working with now. But you already knew that, now didn’t you?
[Via Physorg]
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Posted in nvidia, geforce, graphics, GPU, 9400 M, 9400M, GeForce 9400 M, Geforce9400M | No Comments »
October 15th, 2008 by
Filed under: Desktops, Gaming, Media PCs
Alright, something’s fishy here. When Apple announced that the new MacBook Pro has two NVIDIA GeForce chips — the 9400M and the 9600M GT — the focus was on what that means for battery life. Absent any mention of Hybrid SLI, we assumed that was all, but PC Mag has posted some eyebrow-raising benchmarks comparing the new MacBook Pro to HP’s Pavilion HDX16t, which also features a 9600M GT. While the MacBook Pro test model fell behind the Pavilion in most benchmarks due to its slower processor, its Crysis framerate beat that of the Pavilion by 24.1 frames per second — 41.9 over 17.3. That doesn’t make a lot of sense, unless you look at benchmarks of a desktop with NVIDIA’s similar GeForce 9300 chipset and a GeForce 8500 GT — turns out Crysis runs 12.63 frames per second faster (29.19 over 16.56) in Hybrid SLI than it does on the 8500 GT alone. Is the MacBook Pro running in SLI mode when set for performance? We don’t have confirmation of that, but we’ll put it to the test in our forthcoming review — until then, feel free to grab a grain of salt while freaking out anyway.
Update: Sorry, folks — NVIDIA’s just posted a support doc that says the MBP doesn’t support Hybrid SLI in either OS X or Windows — and when running Windows, it’s locked into using the 9600M GT. We’re not sure where that Crysis boost is coming from — GDDR3 vs GDDR2, perhaps — but we’ll dig deeper in our review. Stay tuned.
Read - PC Mag (MacBook Pro benchmarks)
Read - Hot Hardware (NVIDIA GeForce 9300 desktop motherboards benchmarks)
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Posted in Apple, nvidia, sli, geforce, graphics, macbook pro, MacbookPro, GPU, chipset, benchmarks, integrated graphics, HybridSli, geforce 9300, geforce 9400, geforce 9600, Geforce9600, MBP, geforce 8500, geforce8500, igp, macbook-pro | No Comments »
October 10th, 2008 by
Filed under: Laptops
With a new MacBook announcement now just days away, speculation is unsurprisingly at a fever pitch as to exactly what Apple has in store, and the folks at PC Perspective have now pieced together a few clues to whet your appetite in anticipation of the big event. Most of those are drawn from mounting evidence from the NVIDIA camp, including the image above that made an appearance on the company’s website a few days ago and, most importantly, word that NVIDIA would be releasing its GeForce 9400 and 9300 chipsets based on the MCP79 integrated chipset design on October 15th (conveinently not stepping on Apple’s toes the day before). The implication there being that the GeForce chipsets would replace the relatively underpowered integrated Intel graphics on the current MacBooks, with the new MacBook Pros supposedly getting an additional boost from a discrete G92-based mobility GeForce 9600. As PC Perspective points out, if true, that would be quite a coup for NVIDIA, especially considering that it wasn’t all that long ago some were talking about it quitting the chipset business altogether.
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Posted in Apple, nvidia, geforce, macbook, macbook pro, MacbookPro, g92, geforce 9300, geforce 9400, geforce 9600, Geforce9300, Geforce9400, Geforce9600, mcp79 | No Comments »
September 16th, 2008 by
Filed under: Desktops, Gaming
NVIDIA has already slashed the price of its GeForce GTX 260 and GTX 280 graphics cards in order to better compete with AMD’s bang-for-the-buck-beating ATI Radeon HD 4850 and 4870 cards, and it’s now taken things one step further by introducing a new, slightly improved model. While it likely won’t cause anyone to ditch their existing GTX 260, NVIDIA is betting that the 216 stream processors of its new GTX 260 Core 216 (up from 192 before) will be enough to win over at least a few new performance-happy gamers. Apart from that upgrade, it seems the only other real improvement you can expect is a boost to 72 texture filtering units (up from 64), but HotHardware found that those tweaks were just enough to deliver some fairly substantial performance gains, with the GTX 260 Core 216 outpacing the Radeon HD 4870 in the “vast majority” of its tests. Best of all, the Core 216 will also apparently work just fine in an SLI configuration with an original GTX 260 and, at an MSRP of $279, it doesn’t demand too much of a premium either.
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Posted in nvidia, geforce, geforce gtx 260 core 216 | No Comments »
August 12th, 2008 by
Filed under: Misc. Gadgets, Gaming
It’s not a direct response to AMD unveiling the HD Radeon 4850 X2 and 4870 X2 yesterday, but NVIDIA also came to play at SIGGRAPH, and it’s got lots of new GPU-as-CPU toys for us this morning — and what’s more, they’re free. Like we’d been hearing, GeForce 8, 9, and 200-series cards are all getting PhysX support as of today via a free GeForce Power Pack that contains a free full copy of Warmonger, three PhysX-enabled Unreal Tournament 3 maps, demos of Metal Knight Zero and the Nurien UT3-based social networking service, and a couple tech demos. The Power Pack also includes some new CUDA apps to play with, including a new Folding@Home client (ahem) and a trial version of the Badaboom video transcoder. That’s a lot of new toys, so get downloading and let us know what you think!
Read - PhysX GeForce Power Pack apps
Read - CUDA GeForce Power Pack apps
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Posted in nvidia, geforce, physx, cuda, siggraph, siggraph 2008, Siggraph2008, geforce power pack, GeforcePowerPack | No Comments »
August 7th, 2008 by
Filed under: Gaming, Peripherals
It’s arriving a month later than anticipated, but at least it’s arriving (we hope). According to a first look at PhysX on NVIDIA’s GeForce cards, The Tech Report is reporting (ahem) that the graphical outfit will dish out new drivers that add PhysX support on August 12th. The new software will allow owners of GeForce 8, GeForce 9 and GeForce GTX 200-series cards to use PhysX acceleration without shelling out any additional coinage, which means that you all will surely be giving it a shot just for kicks, right? Keep next Tuesday clear — you and Unreal Tournament 3 have a date, like it or not.
[Via UberReview]
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Posted in nvidia, geforce, graphics, GPU, Graphics card, GraphicsCard, ageia, physx, PhysX ppu, PhysxPpu | No Comments »
August 4th, 2008 by
Filed under: Laptops
MSI has clearly been busy with its Wind here lately, but that doesn’t mean it has forgotten entirely about the gaming crowd. The 15.4-inch GX620 and 17-inch GX720 were both made official today, even though they made their debut at CeBIT. Now that the specifications are nailed down, here’s what you’re looking at: an Intel Core 2 Duo processor, NVIDIA’s 512MB GeForce 9600M GT, up to 4GB of DDR2 RAM, a 2-megapixel webcam, gigabit Ethernet, WiFi, a 320GB SATA drive, an optional Blu-ray drive, 6-cell battery and the usual assortment of ports. Sadly, there’s no mention of prices just yet, but click on past the break for the full release.
Continue reading MSI gets official with Centrino 2-based GX620 / GX720 gaming laptops
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Posted in nvidia, Blu-ray, geforce, official, gaming PC, GamingPc, gaming laptop, GamingLaptop, msi, centrino 2, Centrino2, gx620, gx720, 9600M GT, 9600mGt | No Comments »
August 2nd, 2008 by
Filed under: Gaming, Peripherals
We already had a glance at NVIDIA’s newest low-ender, the GeForce 9500 GT, but the outfit clearly wasn’t done. In case the previously mentioned card was just a tad too weak for your needs, you can also check out the GeForce 9800 GT and / or 9800 GTX+, which feature 112 / 128 stream processors and support for HybridPower and PhysX. Both cards can be found just about everywhere right now for $149.99 and $199.99, respectively, with 512MB of RAM on board.
[Via Hardware Revolution]
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Posted in nvidia, geforce, GPU, Graphics card, GraphicsCard, 9800 gtx, 9800Gtx, 9500 gt, 9500Gt, 9800 gt, 9800Gt | No Comments »
July 31st, 2008 by
Filed under: Laptops
So now that HP’s joined Dell in releasing information on which laptops have those defective NVIDIA GPUs, we can sort of piece together which chips are faulty — and just as had been rumored, it looks like basically every Geforce 8600M and 8400M chip is affected. That’s not good news for NVIDIA, which has been saying that only “previous-generation” chips were problematic — unless the chipmaker is planning on updating the hugely popular 8×00 series sometime, say, now, that’s not exactly true, now is it? Other affected chips appear to be in the GeForce Go 7000 and 6000 lines, as well as the Quadro NVS 135M and the Quadro FX 360M, but that’s just looking at model numbers, and we can’t be exactly sure. We’d say that if you’ve got a machine with any one of these GPUs, it might be wise to call in and see what your laptop maker is going to do — and it would be smart for NVIDIA to come right out and say exactly how big and how bad this problem really is.
Read - Dell list of machines and patch
Read - HP list of machines, extended warranty info
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Posted in nvidia, dell, geforce, hp, recall, hewlett packard, HewlettPackard, Hewlett-Packard, geforce go, GeforceGo, defective, 8400m, 8600m, 8400, 8600 | No Comments »
July 18th, 2008 by
Filed under: Gaming, Laptops
So it seems that NVIDIA has been sneaking its 9700M / 9800M GPUs into potent gaming laptops for a little while now, but we’re finally getting some official-ish verbiage on the new-ish families. The GeForce 9700M GT, 9700M GTS, 9800M GT, 9800M GTS and 9800M GTX should all be available as we speak in some of your favorite portable LAN machines, with the latter capable of a mind-melting 420 gigaflops. For more on the graphical powerhouse that could be sitting within your machine right now, check the read link.
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Posted in nvidia, geforce, graphics, GPU, Graphics card, GraphicsCard, 9700m, 9700M GT, 9700M GTs, 9700mGt, 9700mGts, 9800m, 9800m gt, 9800m gtx, 9800mGt, 9800mGtx, nvidia 9800m, Nvidia9800m | No Comments »
July 18th, 2008 by
Filed under: Desktops
Apparently some folks have $6,600 to toss on a gaming PC, and thankfully, those folks — we won’t mention names — invested in a camera to let us all live vicariously. HP’s Blackbird 002 Exhilaration Edition, which packs a pair of NVIDIA’s potent GeForce GTX 280 cards, has landed in the home of one lucky gamer, and there’s a good selection of pictures to prove it. You know where to head from here.
[Thanks, bioender]
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Posted in unboxed, unboxing, geforce, pictures, gaming PC, GamingPc, hp, limited edition, LimitedEdition, hewlett packard, HewlettPackard, pics, Hewlett-Packard, unbox, blackbird, blackbird 002, Blackbird002, gaming rig, GamingRig, blackbird 002 exhilaration edition, Blackbird002ExhilarationEdition, exhilaration edition, ExhilarationEdition, gts 280, Gts280 | No Comments »
July 14th, 2008 by
Filed under: Gaming
As expected, NVIDIA just slashed the price of its top-end GTX 280 and GTX 260 graphics processors in recognition of AMD’s new RV770 GPU. The GeForce GTX 280 is now $499 ($649 at launch) and the GTX 260 is priced at $299 (down from $399). Once again demonstrating that it’s not from the benevolence of the hooker, the thug or the police, that we expect more realistic havoc in Liberty City, but from GPU manufacturers’ regard to their own self interest.
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Posted in nvidia, geforce, geforce gtx 280, GeforceGtx280, gtx 280, Gtx280, geforce gtx 260, GeforceGtx260, gtx 260, Gtx260 | No Comments »
July 3rd, 2008 by
Filed under: Desktops, Gaming
It only launched a few weeks ago, but it looks like NVIDA could already be set to cut the price of its top-end GeForce GTX 280 graphics card — a move that would be prompted, as you might have guessed, by AMD’s cheaper but powerful Radeon HD 4800 series. According to HotHardware, that word comes from “multiple NVIDIA board partners,” who say that the card could be dropping to as low as $499 (the same as AMD’s competing card). One board partner reportedly added that the price “may be a little higher, or potentially even a little lower.” Obviously, all of that is still up in the air until we hear from NVIDIA itself but, as HotHardware points out, it could certainly pay off to hold out a couple of weeks if you’ve been considering taking the plunge on one of these.
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Posted in nvidia, geforce, geforce gtx 280, GeforceGtx280, gtx 280, Gtx280 | No Comments »
June 29th, 2008 by
Filed under: Laptops
Okay, so maybe Cizmo’s CX1730M is based heavily on Clevo’s M570TU, but it’s still one beast of a machine. This 17-inch monster packs a 2.26GHz Core 2 Duo processor, 2GB of DDR3 RAM, a 160GB SATA hard drive, WSXGA+ panel, a 2-megapixel webcam, dual-layer DVD burner (or optional Blu-ray drive), NVIDIA’s 512MB GeForce 8800M GTX and a plethora of ports. Amazingly, this one tips the scales at “just” 8.7-pounds, which actually isn’t half bad for a unit this potent. Additionally, it looks as if you can order this puppy in a variety of hues — including the above pictured camouflage — right now starting at €1,427 ($2,249).
[Via NotebookItalia]
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Posted in geforce, rebadge, gaming laptop, GamingLaptop, 8800GTX, 8800 gtx, clevo, cizmo, CX1730M | No Comments »
June 25th, 2008 by
Filed under: Gaming, Laptops
If you pulled the trigger early on an XPS M1730, you may have gotten “stuck” with “just” a GeForce 8700M GT or similar. If you just can’t be behind the times, Dell is finally offering a solution with the GeForce 8800M GTX upgrade kit. Said package includes dual SLI 1GB GDDR3 PCI Express graphics card designed specifically to boost frame rates and install all sorts of Vista-compatible bragging rights. If you’re comfortable with doing the swap yourself, the upgrade price sits at a penny under $1,100. For those seeking professional help, you’ll be coughing up $1,218.99. For those of you not frozen in place by sticker shock, you can peek the how-to guide for installation after the break.
[Via Laptoping, thanks Danijel]
Continue reading Twin GeForce 8800M GTX upgrade now available for Dell’s XPS M1730
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Posted in nvidia, dell, m1730, xps, xps m1730, XpsM1730, geforce, gaming laptop, GamingLaptop, upgrade, GPU, Graphics card, GraphicsCard, 8800M GTX, 8800mGtx | No Comments »
June 21st, 2008 by
Filed under: Desktops, Gaming
We knew driver-enabled PhysX support was due for NVIDIA’s line some time soon, but HotHardware’s reporting that GeForce 8 and 9-series owners will finally have it when ForceWare 177.39 ships alongside the GeForce 9800 GTX+ in July. The preliminary benchmarks seem to show some serious GPU performance gains for PhysX operations, so with any luck you’ll soon be rendering Independence Day fireworks at greater framerates than ever previously imagined.
[Via Slashdot]
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Posted in nvidia, software, geforce, physx, drivers, 9800 gtx, 9800Gtx, forceware | No Comments »
June 20th, 2008 by
Filed under: Gaming
Yeah, that bench. NVIDIA’s just-announced-yesterday GeForce 9800 GTX+ has already been used and abused for your satisfaction, and the folks over at PC Perspective have the benchmarks to prove it. The 55nm-based card was pit against an 8800 GT and AMD’s extraordinarily fresh Radeon HD 4850, but we’re not going to insert any spoilers in this space (okay, so it fared well… really well). All the graphs and screen captures you crave are waiting just down there.
[Thanks, Ryan]
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Posted in nvidia, geforce, graphics, GPU, Graphics card, GraphicsCard, benchmark, benchmarks, 9800 gtx, 9800Gtx, geforce 9800 gts, Geforce9800Gts | No Comments »
June 16th, 2008 by
Filed under: Desktops, Gaming
It’s not all that often we see a video card get dissected, but it’s also not very often that we see a card with as much hardware as NVIDIA’s new top-end GeForce GTX 280, which proved to be enough to get the folks at Custom PC to crack one open for a looksee. As you can see above, after removing more than a few screws, they were able to take a peak at the card’s lone, massive GPU, which not surprisingly produces enough heat to require the huge cooler and heat sink that conceals it. Of course, they also put the card through its paces and, while they did find that it’s bar-none the fast single GPU card out there, the performance compared to a GeForce 9800 GX2 makes the situation a bit murkier, especially given the GTX 280’s hefty price tag and lofty system requirements. That apparently wasn’t enough to keep it from getting their seal of approval, however, with it earning a more than respectable 84% rating.
Read - Custom PC, “Taking apart the GeForce GTX 280″
Read - Custom PC, GeForce GTX 280 Review
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Posted in nvidia, geforce, geforce gtx 280, GeforceGtx280, gtx 280, Gtx280 | No Comments »
June 16th, 2008 by
Filed under: Desktops, Gaming
NVIDIA just launched its new GeForce GTX 280 graphics cards earlier today, but you know the crazy kids over at Alienware don’t like to wait for the latest and greatest — Dell’s gaming division has already announced Area-51 configurations that include the new cards. The Area-51 7500 will support one GTX 280-based card, while the top-of-the-line Area-51 ALX will offer a three-way SLI option that’s sure to render an image of your empty wallet in no time — it’s a $1,700 option. No word on when these are scheduled to ship, but seeing as the cards are out tomorrow, we’d guess it’ll be soon.
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Posted in nvidia, geforce, alienware, area-51 alx, Area-51Alx, area 51, area-51, Area51, 7500, area 51 7500, Area517500, geforce gtx 280, GeforceGtx280, gtx 280, area 51 alx, area-51 7500, Area-517500, Area51Alx | No Comments »
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