Heavy users of Adobe Creative Suite 4 will know that the only thing worse than a hangover for slowing the design process is a computer unable to keep up. CS4 feasts on processor cycles like supermodels crave bacon; thankfully here’s NVIDIA to the rescue with their Quadro CX, a PCI-E card dedicated to giving the graphics software all the grunt it needs.
NVIDIA have officially announced the GeForce 9400M graphics chipset, the same found in the new MacBooks that Apple unveiled at yesterday’s event. The chipset differs from existing integrated graphics by virtue of incorporating both the full mainboard chipset, including memory and bus controllers, with the GPU; it promises 5x speed increases on both MacBook and Windows systems.
Apple has publicly blamed NVIDIA for graphics hardware failures in some MacBook Pro models, after initially customers were informed that their computers would not be affected. The news is the latest blow to NVIDIA, whose GPU problem has caused multiple laptops to overheat. According to Apple, NVIDIA assured them back in July that the issue would not impact on MacBooks; however the company’s own investigation turned up NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT graphics processors being inaccurately reported as integrated Intel chips.
ATI are planning a sub-$150 HD 4000 series video card that will take on NVIDIA’s GeForce 9800 GT, in the shape of the Radeon HD 4830. According to leaked slides from AMD, the card will feature 640 stream processors, a 256-bit memory interface and GDDR3 memory, and slot in-between the Radeon HD 4850 and HD 4670.
Palit have released a quad-output graphics card based on ATI’s Radeon 4870 HD. The Palit Radeon HD 4870 1GB Sonic Dual Edition consists of an overclocked ATI chipset with a sizable dual-fan cooler and switchable dual-BIOS for ’sonic’ and ‘turbo’ modes. The output options are twin HDCP-compliant DVI and a DisplayPort socket, with included converters for DVI-to-VGA and DVI-to-HDMI.
NVIDIA has announced that Futuremark games will be using NVIDIA PhysX technology for its new first-person shooter, Shattered Horizon. The game is a first-person shooter that simulates a zero-gravity environment.
Jukka Makinen, Head of Futuremark Games Studio said “Shattered Horizon has a real space setting that offers gameplay, tactics, and freedom of movement that cannot be found in any other shooter…PhysX is essential in helping our game designers create a realistic and fun zero-gravity combat experience”
Back when they announced their Dual Drive Bay VGA cooling system for ATI’s storming HD 4870 X2, CoolIT CEO Geoff Lyon told us that by using the liquid-cooled setup they’d managed to overclock the video card by over ten percent. We’re sceptical by nature here at SlashGear, though, and so CoolIT have released a video demonstrating their setup.
Check out the CoolIT demo video after the cut
For those of you who were affected by defective NVIDIA GPUs Dell is offering to extend your warranty by 12-months by way of a “limited warranty enhancement.” The warranty enhancement would allow customers who purchased a potentially defective GPU to get it fixed/replaced for an extra year past their original warranty.
NVIDIA has begun shipping out beta Open GL 3.0 graphics drivers. NVIDIA has played a huge role in creating the API for the 3D graphics drivers which got a major library reworking with this release. The beta version is designed to give software developers a look at the new drivers so they can better create software that uses 3.0 to its full potential.
The beta Open GL 3.0 code works on both laptop and desktops and supports GeForce 8000 series cards. The Open GL specification for cards “provides software developers a broad set of programmable 3D and 2D graphics rendering, visualization, and hardware acceleration functions, allowing a program to run on a wide variety of hardware platforms.”
The new ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 is certainly the latest hot property in the video card industry, but it’s also likely to be hot property in your desktop. So it’s no surprise that we’re seeing the first liquid-cooling system for the Radeon only days after it was announced: Asetek claim their system reduces GPU temperatures by as much as 28-degrees.
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