No additional Windows 7 support for some older cards

Following the recent launch of the HD 5000 series (and DirectX 11), ATI is taking a moment to rearrange their driver priorities. Today they listed a slew of cards that will not be receiving fresh driver updates. The following cards have been relegated to 'legacy' driver status:

ATI Radeon 9500 Series
ATI Radeon 9550 Series
ATI Radeon 9600 Series
ATI Radeon 9700 Series
ATI Radeon 9800 Series
ATI Radeon X300 Series
ATI Radeon X550 Series
ATI Radeon X600 Series
ATI Radeon X700 Series
ATI Radeon X800 Series
ATI Radeon X850 Series
ATI Radeon X1050 Series
ATI Radeon X1300 Series
ATI Radeon X1550 Series
ATI Radeon X1600 Series
ATI Radeon X1650 Series
ATI Radeon X1800 Series
ATI Radeon X1900 Series
ATI Radeon Xpress Series
ATI Radeon X1200 Series
ATI Radeon X1250 Series
ATI Radeon X2100 Series

If you have one of these video cards, and worried about Windows 7 compatibility, rest assured --  you don't have too much cause for concern. While Windows 7 support is not 'official' for these aging cards, you still should not have any trouble using the recent Vista Catalyst 9.8 drivers without too many problems in Win 7.

If you are miffed that your card has been deemed a 'legacy' product, a good way of dealing with the situation is taking it as a great excuse to justifying spending money on a new gaming graphics card.  

See Unigine's 'Heaven' in action in these videos

Hot on the heels of Microsoft's Windows 7 release, software developer Unigine has unleashed the world's first DirectX 11 benchmark unto the world after five years of development, dubbing it 'Heaven.'

Unigine's engine makes use of hardware tesselation, a feature that has been present on ATI graphics card for a few generations, but is now being put to full use. Without going into too much detail, it adds polygons within polygons so developers can use compressed JPEG images without sacrificing image quality. In other words, we get better looking graphics and, best of all, without a performance hit on DirectX 11 hardware. The video below show's tesselation in action compared to low quality textures rendered normally.

As you can see, the benchmark is nothing short of impressive and, surprisingly, performance is actually pretty good.

In case you haven't picked up an HD5000-series card yet, the benchmark is also backward compatible with DirectX 9 and 10 as well as OpenGL. However, only the full blown DirectX 11 can take advantage of the latest features including DirectCompute and tesselation. If you're still riding the XP bandwagon, you will need to upgrade in order to enjoy those latest advancements in graphics technologies.

Oh and if you feel the urge to start your own game studio and use Unigine's product, it's going to cost you right around $25,000. Of course, it's easier to simply pick up an HD5000 card while waiting for one of the upcoming DirectX 11 titles including DiRT 2, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat, Aliens vs Predator or the already-released Battleforge.

Full 5800 series support, Ubuntu 9.10 support, and multiple resolved issues noted

ATI today releases its 9.10 set of drivers for HD2000 series cards and newer, running under Windows XP, Vista or 7, coinciding with the latter operating system's launch.

For those who have picked up a card or two in the new 5800 series, this release is especially good news as it provides full support (unlike the previous beta drivers), including super sample anti-aliasing.

Aside from that, there's also a range of bug fixes and more to be had. Check out the details in the release notes below, and remember to uninstall your old set of drivers and clean them out with Driver Sweeper before installing the new set. Grab the 9.10 download via the AMD Graphics Drivers & Software link at bottom.

New Features:

Official ATI Catalyst WHQL release supporting ATI Radeon HD 5800 series GPUs

• ATI Catalyst 9.10 now includes full GPU support for the award winning ATI HD Radeon 5800 series GPUS!

Super Sample Anti-Aliasing for the ATI Radeon HD 5800 Series

• ATI Catalyst 9.10 provides support for a new Anti-Aliasing method on the ATI Radeon HD 5800 Series.  Users can now experience the high level of anti-aliasing image quality using Super Sampling anti-aliasing while maintaining good performance levels. 

Highlights of the ATI Catalyst™ 9.10 release for Linux includes:

New Features

Support for new Linux operating systems

• • This release of ATI Catalyst driver for Linux introduces support for the following new operating systems:
    • Ubuntu 9.10 early look support

Highlights of resolved issues

• Ghostbusters video game no longer flickers between desktop and game play when anti-aliasing is set to 8X and game resolution set to 2560×1600
• Enabling Screen Space Ambient Occlusion option in “Riddick 2 Dark Athena” no longer causes the game to fail under Multi-GPU configurations
• Severe flickering no longer observed while running 3D games/samples on specific HDMI displays with configurations using ATI CrossFireX™ technology in tri and quad modes
• Desktop flashing no longer observed after driver installation and reboot with systems configured with Radeon ASIC in the primary PCIe slot and ATI Fire Stream™ ASIC in the secondary PCIe slot
• “Combat Mission Shock Force” no longer fails after a duration of game play

• Underscan/Overscan settings for TV can now be applied from the ATI Catalyst Control Center – TV Properties Adjustments page
• Changes to the “All Settings” and “Basic Quality” pages in ATI Catalyst Control Center - Avivo™ Video will now be retained after reboot

Anticipation grows for the next-gen design

As you have probably heard, AMD/ATI has launched their next generation of GPUs recently. With the HD 5870 and HD 5770 flying off the shelves, more and more people are wondering when NVIDIA will show off what is has been working on in the last little while.

Unfortunately we don't have a date to give you for the big release of Fermi -- the name of the new architecture from NVIDIA. From folks we talked to, and things we saw the other week in California at NVIDIA's GPU Technology Conference, the best guess we can give you is that'll it arrive a few weeks before Christmas.

Fermi represents a real shake-up for NVIDIA's focus. Well, it might be more correct to say that the change of focus has already happened, and Fermi is the evidence of this change. What's the big change? NVIDIA is positioning their next generation of GPUs not only as good for handling graphics, but as a sort of parallel co-processor for your computer.

NVIDIA is investing heavily in the development of CUDA, as witnessed by the release of Nexus, and native support for C++. They are banking on many software developers being attracted to the relative ease of programming specialized apps for CUDA, which will make NVIDIA the only provider of the specialized hardware needed to take advantage of this new breed of GPU-designated code.

"Fermi is a radically different way of building GPUs", said NVIDIA founder Jen-Hsun Huang, in a press conference for Fermi. He continued to say Fermi will bring the "first unified environment for a heterogeneous computing situation" -- heterogeneous in the sense that a computer with Fermi will have a general purpose CPU, and a then a parallel processor in the GPU.

Fermi is certainly going to bring the horses. The top GT300 / GF100 40nm chip has some mammoth specs: a whopping 3 billion transistors, 384-bit memory interface supporting (possibly) upwards of 6GB of GDDR5 for the Tesla and Quadro parts (with the GeForce 380 perhaps sporting 1.5GB), 512 'CUDA' cores (also known as shader cores), 1MB L2 cache, and a 768KB L2 cache. 

"We need something big and new," Jen-Hsun said, "[something] to bring back the sex appeal."

When asked about whether they were very worried with the big market hit by releasing Fermi a few months after the HD 5800 launched, if Jen-Hsun was concerned he did a good job of hiding it. He explained that Fermi was about a new vision for the GPU -- so, NVIDIA was more concerned with getting this new vision right and launching it successfully than it was in merely keeping pace with the rising GPU horsepower from ATI.

Is NVIDIA's focus on CUDA merely maintained as a relief valve for the pressure of having to keep up with ATI's speedy 40nm GPU development? There have been rumors that NVIDIA has had trouble crafting chips, and there has been a great deal of product rebranding over the last year. Or, instead, does Fermi really represent what the company sees as their best method of growing forward into the next decade? The adoption of CUDA by developers does seem to be the crux of their next big Fermi push. Researchers and private industry have been getting aboard wholeheartedly on CUDA, but there has not been a huge deluge of apps for people like you and me. And there are about 10,000 of you and me for every research scientist.*

From what we've seen, NVIDIA has the hardware ready to go, and now its a matter of inspiring the development of many more CUDA-powered apps. We will have to wait to see how it all turns out; but, one thing is for sure: the GPU isn't just about games and graphics any more.

*obviously just making this number up for Hyperbole's sake

For Vista and 7 users

ATI late yesterday appears to have released an update for their new HD 5800 series cards, running under Windows Vista or 7 in 32/64-bit editions.

No release notes are included as such, but naturally it's recommended to grab these for the latest improvements; hit the source for the new package.

As always, uninstall the old set and use a cleaning program like the free Driver Sweeper before installing the new.

For the rest of us, ATI says we can expect the 9.10 drivers when Windows 7 launches -- October 22.

Leaked pictures of an upcoming product?

In an attempt to beat the green team and its leader the Green Goblin, ATI has got Batman & Robin onboard. They are now working on a proprietary machine that, if the rumors are true, will be called the Bat5870.

If the HD5870 is any indication of that machine's performance, it will undoubtedly give them an edge in that epic battle!

Seriously though, the image is a joke; I hope you guessed it. The idea behind this masterpiece probably came to mind in an attempt to find a use for the decorative vents present on the HD5870. Thanks to the user Heinz68 on NVnews forums for the excellent Photoshop job!

OpenGL 3.2/SLI support, improved performance, and tons of fixes noted

NVIDIA has today released its 191.07 set of drivers for GeForce 6, 7, 8, 9, 100, 200 and ION series cards running under Windows XP, Vista or 7.

The latest update is particularly important, as not only does it bring niceities like OpenGL 3.2 and SLI support, there's also better performance for games like Batman: Arkham Asylum and Far Cry 2, and a heap of fixes, including an imperative one for overclocking enthusiasts.

Release highlights are below; for the full notes, these are separated by operating system on NVIDIA's site (link below), where of course you can also nab the drivers. As usual, uninstall the old set and run Driver Sweeper or an equivalent before installing the new.

New in Version 191.07

• Adds support for OpenGL 3.2 for GeForce 8, 9, 100, and 200-series GPUs and ION GPUs.
• Accelerates performance in several gaming applications. The following are examples of improvements measured with version 191.07 drivers vs. version 190.62 drivers (results will vary depending on your GPU, system configuration, and game settings):
  • Up to 12% performance increase in ARMA 2
  • Up to 8% performance increase in Batman: Arkham Asylum with GPU PhysX enabled
  • Up to 50% performance increase in Call of Juarez: Blood in Bound with SLI enabled
  • Up to 14% performance increase in Fallout 3 (indoor scenes) with antialiasing enabled
  • Up to 10% performance increase in Far Cry 2 (DX9 version) with antialiasing enabled
  • Up to 34% performance increase in Prototype with antialiasing enabled
• Adds SLI support for Aion, Darkfall, Dawn of Magic 2: Time of Shadows, Dreamkiller, Fuel, Majesty 2: The Fantasy Kingdom Sim, Need for Speed: Shift and more.
• Includes numerous bug fixes, including the following key fix (additional bug fixes can be found in the release notes on the documentation tab): For graphics cards supporting multiple clock states, 3D clocks correctly return to 2D clocks after exiting a 3D application.

Have a song on MySpace? Win some exposure and cash!

To promote the new PSP version of Beaterator -- a 8-track, music-making application -- Rockstar, Timbaland and MySpace are having a contest. If you have any music making skills, and some songs on sitting on Myspace, you might be interested in taking a stab at this one.

Entering is easy -- just go over here, and submit the links to your MySpace profile that has your tunes. It looks like October 11th is the deadline, and you have to be an American to play. For the first round, any sort of song will do; then, up to 100 artists will be chosen for round two. For round two, they will receive a PSP and a copy of Beaterator, from which they'll have two to make use of the 'portable studio' application to make a new song for the next round. From there, the public will vote on which track they like the best. Winner gets $5000 USD and a bunch of exposure.

Sounds like a good contest to us. 100 PSPs up for grabs makes some fairly good odds. Especially f you already have a MySpace track up, this contest might be fun.

Mending the gap left by Havok and PhysX

PC gamers are in a bit of a state of flux at the moment when it comes to physics; NVIDIA has the aptly named PhysX, Intel the Havok engine. While it's been planned to have any game using either engine work with any card, NVIDIA has recently pulled its support, allowing the disparity to continue.

Nevertheless, AMD has jumped in with a mission to cure what ails you, developing an open source GPU physics solution that will work with either brand of card out there. Dubbed "Bullet Physics", this one is already used in console games (most recently Trials HD) and mobile titles; with AMD's help, it will be brought to the PC with a new engine.

Written in OpenCL, Bullet Physics will make things easier for programmers, in turn meaning better results for gamers. Pixelux Entertainment is the creator of the API, and will also be working with AMD to bring the solution to DirectCompute, DirectX 11's GPU offloading standard.

“Proprietary physics solutions divide consumers and ISVs, while stifling true innovation," says AMD’s CTO of Graphics Eric Demers. "Our competitors even develop code that they themselves admit will not work on hardware other than theirs. By working with Pixelux and others to enable open support of physics on OpenCL and DirectX 11 capable devices we are taking the exact opposite approach.”

“Pixelux wants ensure that our technology can take advantage of the computing resources that any particular hardware platform offers without locking in our users to any single platform,” said Mitchell Bunnell, CEO of Pixelux. “By working with AMD to run our software in OpenCL we stay true to that goal.”

In short, there's a lot to look forward to this upcoming generation. Smile!

We'll have a review shortly

Update: drivers for the 5800 series have surfaced -- grab them here.

ATI's next generation of GPUs, the HD 5000 series, launched last night. The first to make it to the party is the HD 5870.

Featuring DirectX 11 support, Eyefinity technology allowing multiple monitors to make a meta-display, and 1600 shader processors are some of the key elements to this new HD 5870, capable of sustaining over 2 TerraFlops of computing power. The video card is beast -- cards just seem to be getting larger and larger -- and will support HDMI and DisplayPort, along with the two standard DVI outputs.

If you want some serious gaming power, $380 USD seems to be the going rate today, on many online retailers.

Neoseeker is currently testing our recently arrived HD 5870, and our review of this monster will soon be forthcoming.

$9000 cash, and Gigabyte goodies up for grabs

Are you an overclocking fan? Do you sleep next to a giant tub of liquid nitrogen? Well if you do, perhaps you'll be interested to hear that Gigabyte is getting an overclocking competition underway, to raise some exposure for their new Super Overclocked Series of video cards.

The competition is called "Beat me if you dare", and is taking place in three rounds. The first round begins on October 1st, and will be open to people with GTX 260 cards -- that's right, you don't need a Gigabyte brand card; you can enter with any GTX 260.

Each round winner will make a cool $1,500 USD. Beyond that, there is a ton of Gigabyte hardware that'll be dispensed, such as high-end Nvidia cards, and Gigabyte's new gaming mouse, the GM-M8000. Furthermore, any contestants that beat the Gigabyte team's scores will be able to double their prize reward. 

Scores will be tallied in two programs: Vantage and Resident Evil 5.

There is no word yet on what cooling methods are acceptable -- but we will assume exotic cooling is okay. There is a Facebook page and Twitter page set up with contest details, but unfortunately, no web page with all the rules in one location.

Bug fix release covering HD2000 series cards and newer

ATI 9.9 set of drivers are newly available for HD2000 series and newer cards running under Windows XP, Vista or 7. This release is strictly for bug fixes and contains no performance improvements, sadly, but hey, a release is a release.

Your resolved issues are below; hit the source for the full release notes (and the drivers) to check any remaining known issues if you wish. As always, uninstall your old set of drivers first via Control Panel and clean them out with something like Driver Sweeper before installing the new set.

Resolved Issues for All Windows Operating Systems

• Catalyst Control Center - Basic now responds properly after exiting Quick Adjust Video Settings
• Edge enhancement and de-noise sliders in Catalyst Control Center no longer lags or appears out of sync with mouse movement
• Launching Hotkeys Manager in Catalyst Control Center no longer causes an unhandled exception error
• The "Desktop Rotation" page in Catalyst Control Center no longer shows additional information for the second display when the secondary adapter is connected
• HDMI is now detected properly as DTV (HDMI) instead of DTV (DVI) when the HDMI display is hotplugged for the first time
• Catalyst Control Center no longer displays error message when specific HDMI displays are hot unplugged and hotplugged back

Resolved Issues for the Windows 7 Operating System

• Intermittent failures no longer occur with MediaShow Espresso once a transcoding process has been completed

Resolved Issues for the Windows Vista Operating System

• Running OpenGL applications in windowed mode on extended desktop no longer causes the secondary display to go blank for some ASICs
• Task switching between the desktop and a game in progress no longer has a visible delay (7-10 seconds)
• Enabling Screen Space Ambient Occlusion option in "Riddick 2 Dark Athena" no longer causes the game to fail under Multi-GPU configurations
• Catalyst Control Center no longer shows both HDMI displays as DVI when they are connected via HDMI port and to DVI port via HDMI-DVI dongle
• Windows Aero Glass Effects now works properly during HD Blu-ray playback 

Resolved Issues for the Windows XP Operating System

• Resuming video playback after S1 sleep no longer causes HDMI audio to disappear
• Changes to AVIVO Basic color settings are now retained after Catalyst Control Center is re-opened
• AVIVO Basic color setting changes can now be applied during HD DVD playback on specific ASICs on XP Media Center Edition 

Grab some Windows 7 features early

Newly available from Microsoft is a Platform Update for the Windows Vista users out there; the public beta package incorporates a multitude of features from Windows 7 into Vista, a testament to just how similar the architecture between the two operating systems is. A final version of this update will be available to Vista users later this year.

Below is a description of the items included; those most notable to our readers will probably be DirectX 11 support (just in time for the new update) and the Portable Devices Platform.

To acquire the update, grab the Vista script through the Microsoft Download Center linked below, then load up Windows Update to fetch the new content.

• Windows Graphics, Imaging, and XPS Library

The Windows Graphics, Imaging, and XPS library contains the latest advancements in modern graphics technologies for gaming, multimedia, imaging and printing applications. It includes updates to DirectX to support hardware acceleration for 2D, 3D and text based scenarios; DirectCompute for hardware accelerated parallel computing scenarios; and XPS Library for document printing scenarios.

• Windows Automation API

The Windows Automation API allows accessibility tools and test automations to access Windows user interface in a consistent way across operating system versions.

• Windows Portable Devices Platform

The Windows Portable Devices (WPD) Platform supplies the infrastructure to standardize data transfers between an application and a portable device, such as a mobile phone, digital camera, or portable media player.

• Windows Ribbon and Animation Manager Library

The Windows Ribbon and Animation Manager Library includes contains the Windows Ribbon API, a command framework that enables developers to quickly and easily create rich ribbon experiences in their applications, and the Windows Animation Manager API, an animation framework for managing the scheduling and execution of user interface element animations.

Let's game at 7680x3200 today folks!

AMD and ATI were proud to show off an impressive new feature that will be found in their new, high-end next gen' video cards coming soon (codenamed 'Evergreen.') The new feature is called Eyefinity, and it will allow for a single video card to output to up six displays simulateously. 

Not only can you have six seperate screens going, doing seperate things, but you can also link each display together, in any multiple-monitor configuration, to create one giant, ultra high resolution display. For example, if you bought six 30" LCD monitors, you could run some games at a truly insane 7680x3200 resolution.

This might not be a feature that a great deal of users will be able to take advantage of -- but for those with funds available for extra displays, Eyefinity could be eye-catching selling point for ATI's next generation of video cards, presumably named the HD 5000 series

You might be wondering about CrossFire setups -- apparently, yes, six screens isn't the upper limit. If you have 4 cards running in CrossFireX, your system will be able to utilize 24 monitors at once.

If you are interested in reading more juicy details on Eyefinity, follow the source link below.

DX9, 10 and 11 runtimes for all Windows versions

Microsoft has just released its second DirectX update of the year, covering DX 9, 10 and 11 for whatever version of Windows you may fancy. If perchance you're still not in the know, DirectX is a collection of application application programmable interfaces (APIs) which assist in your gaming, video watching, and anything else that falls under the computer multimedia category.

As such, it's highly recommended you download this update (link below) and get to installing -- simply extract the 103 MB file to a new directory and run the installer labeled DXSETUP.

Happy gaming, movie-watching and whatever else does it for you.

New support for Resident Evil 5, Majesty 2, Arkham Asylum and more

For our multi-NVIDIA GPU users, a fresh SLI profile update is now available, the second to date.

This release adds support for four PC games -- Resident Evil 5, the Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood demo, Majesty 2: The Fantasy Kingdom Sim, Need for Speed: Shift -- and improves support in Batman: Arkham Asylum. That last one isn't out yet (excepting Juarez, none of them are), but give the demo a shot and see what improvements you notice.

Grab the update at the source; NVIDIA recommends you use the latest 190.62 driver set with these, so install those if you haven't yet.

Win a DX11 next generation graphics card

PowerColor is holding a design contest to kick off the next generation of videocards with DirectX 11 support. The contest involves creating artwork divided into three categories - wallpapers, screen savers and IM icons. Contestants can submit up to three entries in each category and must incorporate different design elements which include the text www.powercolor.com along with a figure, the PowerColor logo and an ATI Radeon graphic. Entries in each category will be voted on by the public and the winner from each category will receive a high end DirectX 11 next generation PowerColor graphics card.

The design elements can be downloaded from the contest site which also provides additional rules and conditions. Submissions will be accepted starting today, September 1, with September 20 being the last day you can enter. Voting will run September 21-30 with the winners in each category announced on October 5.

For those without uber design skills, you can still get a chance at winning one of 20 Go! Green HD4670 graphics cards simply by voting for you favorite design in each category. With less than three weeks to get your submissions in, be sure to head over to the PowerColor event site and check out the details.

Not exactly a budget board

A new high-end motherboard has gone up for sale today. Built by EVGA, it has a name; it's Classified. The EVGA X58 Classified 4-Way SLI.

Being built upon the performance-focused X58 chipset, you'll be able to run up to 4 Nvidia or ATI video cards, if you are interested in doing such things. The Classified has a whopping 7 PCIe slots. 

Selling for somewhere around $450, this a top-end motherboard, probably appealing to those hardware junkies out there that want the best firepower they can get, no matter the cost.

Interested in the full specs? Click here.

One GTX275 graphics card given away each week

Gigabyte has announced the Chance to Win lottery where it will be giving away a GeForce GTX graphics card each week until September 7th. We got the news a little late but you still have a chance by going to the event page and clicking the Win Now button.

There are a couple of simple steps to follow:

• Post an honest review of your GIGABYTE graphics card at www.newegg.com
• Send a link to the review to vga@gigabyte-usa.com along with your username and you will be entered into the weekly drawing for a free GIGABYTE NVIDIA GeForce GTX 275

As with any contest, you must also meet a few requirements:

• Contestants must have purchased a GIGABYTE graphics card from newegg.com, with an invoice dated on or after June 1st 2009.
• Only reviews submitted for GIGABYTE graphics cards are eligible for the drawing.
• Reviews posted after August 10th, 2009 are eligible for entry.
• Only valid for GIGABYTE graphics card.
• Only one winner per household.
• GIGABYTE will announce 1 weekly winner at www.gigabyte.us
• Contest ends on 7th of September, 2009

So if you want a chance at winning a new GeForce GTX card and you meet the eligibility requirements, head on over to the site and get your entry in by September 7, 2009.

Cherry-picked GPUs run through the gauntlet

Gigabyte has announced its new Super Overclock series of graphics cards that will consist of solely of GPUs that have been cherry-picked for top performance, efficiency and reliability.

In order to assure only the best GPUs are used in the new series of cards, Gigabyte has developed a proprietary GPU Gauntlet sorting process that consists of a testing toolkit that allows it to inspect and select the GPUs with the highest frequency; the program runs for 30 minutes and provides important data on the maximum overclocking ability compared to a stock GPU. Once the Super OC point has been determined, the company's engineers will boost the frequency to offer the highest factory default clock setting in the market.

Each GPU is also tested under extreme graphics load and as well as for power switching and stability with only the GPUs with the best power efficiency and lowest power consumption qualifing for the Super Overclock Series.

The first card in the series with be the GV-N26SO-896I, a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260 GPU, with a core clock of 680MHz compared to the standard 576MHz reference design; the shader clock is upped to 1466MHz (standard 1242MHz) with a memory clock speed of 2350MHz (standard 1998MHz). Gigabyte claims the Super Overclock version offers 25% better performance than the a GTX 260 and 3% better performance than a generic GTX 275 card.

Full specifications can be found on the GV-N26SO-896I product page; the card should launch in early September but there is no pricing information available yet.

Covering GeForce 8M, 9M, 100M, 200M, Quadro NVS and Quadro FX series cards

If you like to do some gaming or movie-watching on your NVIDIA GPU-based notebook, a new set of drivers has been released today which bring a number of application compatibility fixes and should help you out.

The 186.81 set cover most GeForce 8M, 9M, 100M, 200M, Quadro NVS and Quadro FX series cards running under Windows XP, Vista or 7.

Release notes are separated by operating system, so check them at the source below for resolved and remaining issues if you wish. As always, uninstall the old set and use Driver Sweeper or something similar before installing these ones.

1000 individually numbered limited edition cards to be produced

When word first came out about the Asus Republic of Gamers (ROG) MARS videocard, we used words like "mammoth" and "monstrous" to describe it. First showcased at Computex 2009, the card is now set to become more than just something thought up by the Asus engineers as it will soon become available in the US and Canada.

This is not your father's GTX 295 as Asus has decided to put together something a little different with this card. First they started with dual GTX 285 GPUs and then went a little crazy, adding a 4GB frame buffer with the world's first 1024-bit memory interface (512-bit per GPU). The engineers beefed up the cooling with 66% greater heatpipe coverage with the end result being a card Asus claims is 23% more powerful than conventional GTX 295 graphics cards with a 20% better heat dissipation rate.

The card sports a core clock speed of 648MHz, shader clock speed of 1476MHz and memory clock speed of 1.152GHz (2.304GHz data rate). In addition to tweaking performance, Asus added EMI shielding around the card, covered chokes and Low RDS(on) MOSFETs that run 25% more efficient and 15C cooler than standard components along with a pair of fuses for double the overvoltage protection when compared to reference designs.

With only 1000 units scheduled to be produced with each card assigned a unique serial number, I bet you're asking "How much?" and "When can I get one?". Well, Asus isn't exactly saying although the company did reveal that details will be announced on ASUS' official Twitter social networking page.

Windows 7 DirectCompute support, improved performance and bug fixes noted

Late yesterday, NVIDIA released its newest set of drivers, covering all GeForce 6, 7, 8, 9, 100, 200 and ION series cards running under Windows XP, Vista or 7.

Among the notable additions in the 190.62 release are Windows 7 support for Microsoft's new DirectX GPU Computing API, DirectCompute, improved performance in the latest PhysX titles, including Batman: Arkham Asylum and Darkest of Days, and lastly, the usual round of bug fixes.

The release notes are separated by operating system, so if you wish to check exactly what's been fixed and what issues remain, check them at the source below, where the drivers can also be obtained.

$111 worth of discounts, plus a few MIRs

Many manufacturers teamed up to offer customers a mega bundle deal on an AMD Dragon Platform computer, available on Newegg.com. It comprises eight, yes eight components. In other words, what you get is a complete PC. The only thing left to do is build it.

This computer sets you at a not too shabby $679.88 after MIRs, or $719.88 without. Moreover, you get free shipping on this large package. Buying each part separately would cost you $831.81 and most probably a somewhat steep shipping cost.

With the already awesome price/performance ratio of the dragon platform, this deal just make it even more attracting. Don't miss out on it!

Covering issues with RE5, Company of Heroes, Ghostbusters and Sims 3

If you've ran into any trouble recently trying to run Company of Heroes, Ghostbusters or The Sims 3 on your PC, and run an ATI HD2000 series card or newer, the company has recently released a Hotfix driver which should clear up any problems. Resident Evil 5, which releases next month, is also covered.

They do note if you are not experiencing any of the issues described, it's not recommended to install it as it hasn't been through the throes of testing and is provided "as is."

Below are the release notes; you can grab the 153/100MB driver at the source linked at bottom.

This articles provides a hotfix solution for game applications, (Resident Evil 5, Company of Heroes, Ghostbusters & Sims 3) that experience graphics corruption during game play.

It also provides a resolution to intermittent crashes that may occur when graphics settings are set to Ultra while playing a skirmish game versus the computer in the “Angonville map”.

Symptoms:

The following errors may occur during game play of the above mentioned games:

o   No Anti-Aliasing support for Ghostbusters

o   Graphics corruption when playing Sims 3

o   No support for CrossfireX when playing Resident Evil 5.

Furthermore, an intermittent crash may occur when playing Company of Heroes – Tales of Valor expansion pack, specifically when:

1)     The graphic’s settings are set to Ultra in the options menu

2)     The user enters a 1 vs. 1 skirmish game against the computer on Angoville

3)     The user plays the game against the computer until a crash occurs (This can occur after 20 minutes of game play)

Resolution:  
In order to resolve the issues related to the 3D games, please download and install the applicable hotfix. This hotfix provides solutions for the following issues:

o   Anti-Aliasing support for Ghostbusters

o   ATI CrossFireX™ support for Resident Evil 5

o   Graphics corruption fix for Sims 3

o   Bug fix for Company of Heroes – Tales of Valor expansion pack