nvidia

It's certainly not a bad thing that the new $349 (give or take, but more likely give) Nvidia Geforce 8800 GTS delivers comparable performance to last year's $500-plus GeForce 8800 GTX. The question is, would you be able to pick it out off the shelf? To do so you'd have to sift through the older (and slower) 640MB and 320MB GeForce 8800 GTS cards, as well as the 512MB and 256MB (introduced today) versions of the GeForce 8800 GT. Then, of course, there's the various overclocked SKUs from ASUS, EVGA, XFX, and Nvidia's other board … 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

Hot on the heels of the exclusive sneak peek photos we brought you last week, boutique computer maker Alienware finally let the press and public see its new creations in person Monday at a preview event. We call it that rather than a launch event, as the new Area-51 m15x and Area-51 m17x likely won't be available until the beginning of 2008.

We did, however, get to see these new systems in action, and as expected, both the 15- and 17-inch models will offer some hardcore hardware, including Core 2 Duo Extreme processors and the latest Nvidia GeForce 8800M … Read more

The state of the PC gaming industry is fine. Just ask any executive whose business depends on PC gaming.

Representatives from Nvidia, Intel, Microsoft, Electronic Arts, and Crytek held a combination political rally/pep talk for the PC gaming industry Friday at Nvidia's GeForce LAN 4 event in Alameda, Calif. The audience--several hundred rabid PC gamers with plans to spend the entire weekend playing Crysis--cheered the panelists as they reassured attendees that all was well in the PC gaming world.

The runaway success of gaming consoles like Microsoft's Xbox 360, Nintendo's Wii, and Sony's PlayStation 3 … 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

Nvidia seems to be offering a steal of a video card this morning. Its new GeForce 8800 GT will go for between $200 and $250, and Nvidia claims it's faster than the $450 ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT, and Nvidia's own GeForce 8800 GTS cards. We're working on our own review, and you can expect a post up shortly. Based on the results of a handful of review sites, Nvidia seems to have delivered a bargain here, taking out both its own and ATI's previous bang-for-the-buck winners.

Aside from the price-performance value, the GeForce 8800 GT … Read more

Advanced Micro Devices will release open-source driver software to improve Linux support for its ATI graphics chips and is contributing help and funding to outside programmers who are improving the driver, according to a Linux graphics expert.

AMD is sharing specifications, releasing source code of one software component, and funding programmer work on the project, said Michael Larabel of the Phoronix site, which measures Linux performance. AMD is working with Novell's Suse Linux programmers on the project, he said.

An AMD representative told CNET News.com that the company plans to release details later Thursday about its open-source driver … Read more

Now for the Mobile PC Processors session at Hot Chips. Previous Hot Chips installments covered networking, the Reed Hundt speech, AMD keynote, wireless networking, technology and software, process technology, multicore designs, IBM's Power 6 efforts, Vernor Vinge's keynote address, and Nvidia. Other CNET coverage may be found here. Comments are welcome!

Alas, there wasn't much… Read more