It’s the holiday season, and that means it’s time to send yourself spiraling into crushing debt made possible by the power of plastic. While you could responsibly commit to a reasonable budget, we know that the seductive potential of a $600 PC that isn’t terrible may be too much for your feeble will. If you’re looking for a little rationalization to pull the trigger, chalk it up to aiding our abyss of an economy.
TweakTown benchmarks NVIDIA’s latest drivers, the Forceware 180.47 suite.
What a troubled life it has been for that happy-go-lucky little dinosaur.
Virtual Hideout compares Zotac’s 9800 GT AMP, 260 GTX AMP, and 280 GTX AMP Edition video cards. Get AMPed up!
TechReport analyzes the AMD vs NVIDIA price battle with enough charts and graphs to make your mind spin. In short: AMD undercuts like it’s going out of style.
NVIDIA says Core i7 will unlock the power of SLI so Hexus tests three GTX 280s in Tri-SLI on an X58 board.
Silicon Valley memory technologies firm RAMBUS has filed an injunction against NVIDIA with the US International Trade Commission containing allegations of copyright infringement.
The complaint claims that NVIDIA, in addition to 16 other companies, are violating 17 RAMBUS patents related to the memory controller which allows VRAM to communicate with other components of the GPU.
Rambus General Counsel Tom Lavelle indicated that NVIDIA and RAMBUS negotiated the current dispute for six years without resolution. “We believe this action is necessary given Nvidia’s continued willful infringement of our patents,” he said in press release last Thursday.
The US ITC is expected to determine if the filing is worth investigation within thirty days.
Hardware Canucks rates the EVGA 9800 GTX+ 512MB as a better buy than the popular HD 4850.
The new Toshiba Qosmio X305 laptop
The unique design featuring three NVIDIA GPUs enables the Qosmio X305-Q708 and X305-Q706 laptops to deliver scorching gaming performance by combining the horsepower of two discrete GeForce 9800M GTS GPUs with NVIDIA SLI® technology, and allows the option of switching to a quiet operation mode with NVIDIA Hybrid SLI technology. In Hybrid SLI operation, the powerful 9800M GTS GPUs are powered down and graphics operation is transferred to the GeForce 9400M GPU.
The result of all this is laptops starting at just under $2,000 with decent video performance and battery life that can handle Vista’s need for eye candy without flinching. Check them out here for more information.
A note from the editor: The content trapped behind the jump is potentially NSFW and does not represent the views of Icrontic, its editors, its owners, or even the author. People just like to read ridiculous talking points get run through the mud. Someone has to deliver the goods.
TheInquirer, ever a hotbed of salacious tidbits, has run a story indicating that NVIDIA is accusing ATI of cheating in Far Cry 2 by speeding up rendering through the elimination of minute scene details.
NVIDIA alleges that ATI has cheated benchmarks by tinkering with the zbuffer, a rendering technique that assures certain objects appear in front of others moving towards the horizon. Big green says that ATI is swapping to a method called R32F which wouldn’t force ATI cards to render scads of detailed rocks scattered about the ground in Ubisoft’s newest title.
Meanwhile, followup with ATI driver development lead Terry Makedon indicated that the issue at hand is little more than the error of a driver engineer. Makedon said that a fix for the mistake was included in a hotfix for Stalker: Clear Sky, recently patched to support DirectX 10.1 , because it made sense to do so.
As can be expected, NVIDIA has suggested the idea that the hotfix is really a tacit admission of guilt because it was coincidentally released within 12 hours of the initial accusation.
TechConnect benchmarks NVIDIA’s Big Bang II driver set.
TweakTown compares the nForce 730i and GeForce 9300 chipsets.
Think Computers builds an NVIDIA ESA-based system.
NVIDIA has released a beta OpenGL 3.0 Linux driver.
