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Why Robin Makes Batman Better Some of you may know exactly what you’re after in a graphics card, and that’s great. Good for you. But for most people, the market is a confusing one, so why not let the experts give you a hand?
PC gamers may want to have some extra cash on-hand in a few month’s time, because both AMD and Nvidia are expected to release the “next generation” of graphics chips later this year.
Once was a time a graphics card handled just that. Graphics. But these days? Nvidia cards already handle physics processing, and by next year both Nvidia and ATI cards might handling AI as well.
Processor and graphics-card manufacturer Advanced Micro Devices is cutting 1,000 jobs and reducing pay for everyone else to get through terrible times for computer sales.
A hot topic this year amongst nay-sayers has been the impending “death” of the PC gaming market. Let’s hear what AMD’s senior vice president Rick Bergman has to say on the subject.
When the PC industry’s big guns high-fived as they broke from a warm, gushy group hug, they high-fived with a pledge: that they’d do what they could to help give traditional PC gaming a kick in the pants. We’ve seen what Nvidia are doing, so what about AMD? They’re…well, they’re going to start putting little badges on their PCs. If a computer’s got a badge that says “AMD Game”, it’ll play more than just Freespace. If it says “AMD Game Ultra”, it’ll even manage something like Crysis. You can see an example of the badges to your left. I don’t know. It’s not that its necessarily a bad idea, just…we were kinda hoping for a little more than just (likely ineffectual) badges, you know?
AMD launches “Good Housekeeping” stamp of approval for gaming computers [VentureBeat]
Just because AMD’s busy with its Phenom processors doesn’t mean the company’s gone slack with driver releases for its Radeon brand of graphics cards. Hence, AMD’s just brought out version 8.2 of its Catalyst software/driver bundle.
Hardware-wise, there are a bunch of fixes for CrossFire and HDMI. On the software side, AMD’s improved the functionality and usability of the OverDrive overclocking feature.
Under known issues, Lost Planet, Quake Wars, and STALKER all received attention, with a particularly nasty one for Unreal Tournament 3 and maximum texture settings. You can learn more about this particular revision by reading the rest of the release notes.
I’ve included links to the Vista 32-bit and Windows XP versions of the drivers below. If you need anything else, best to visit AMD’s ATI site.
ATI Catalyst 8.2 for Vista 32-bit ATI Catalyst 8.2 for Windows XP [via Blue's News]
Remember AMD’s new graphics card from CES? The one that processed, sliced and diced? It’s ready for purchase. Called the Radeon HD 3870 X2, they’re claiming it’s nearly twice as powerful as the HD 3870, which was released late last year. Mainly because it is, literally, two HD 3870s strapped to a single board. It will also support DirectX 10.1, has an rrp of around $US 450 and is, according to AMD, the “first graphics processor to break the Teraflop (one trillion floating point operations per second) barrier”. Surely an overabundance of flops?
Crysis’ 1.1 patch was touted to improve framerates across the board, but after TechSpot ran the benchmarks, they’ve found the update to be a pretty large disappointment…except in the highest end. You know what we’re talking about, that 1920×1200 setting that was melting computers and stuff. ATI Crossfire setups saw their framerates nearly double in this range—an amazing feat, until you realise…even after such improvements, not one tested setup is breaking the 30fps playable threshold.
Crysis 1.1 patch performance with Multi-GPU testing [techspot]
That red thing right there is AMD’s latest attempt to wrest graphics card supremacy from the cold, vice-like grip of rivals NVIDIA. Dubbed the ATI R680, specs, pricing and performance boasts are all still top secret, though we do know it’ll not only be based on two 55nm processor cores, but can also slice an apple into 17 pieces in less than a second. This being a premium card, you can expect it’ll also be suitable for root vegetables and cheese (both sliced and grated). ATI R680 Graphics Card Is 1000X Faster Than a Cray-1 Supercomputer [Gizmodo]
