First announced in July at Comic-Con, we now have the first hard details on the official, Crysis-branded PC that's due for release later this month. The end result of an assurance by Crytek that their games game could run - at "high" settings - on a $US 900 machine, the rig actually comes in at $US 699, has been christened the "Warhead PC" in honour of the upcoming expansion, and will launch alongside it on September 16. Specs are as follows.

- CPU: Intel Core Duo e7300 (@2.66GHz)
- GFX: Nvidia 9800GT
- RAM: 2GB

Bear in mind this isn't an official announcement, just some stuff reported by journo Chris Remo, who had a chance to check the machine out last week. The official word will come down later this week, and should be accompanied not only by the rest of the tech specs, but also some shots of the final exterior, since it's unknown whether the one pictured is the full retail model, or is just rocking the same hardware.

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Nvidia have produced a proof-of-concept demo that shows how standard (albeit powerful and heavily tweaked) graphics processors can be used to render raytraced scenes in real time.

The demo showed animation running 30 frames per second at 1,920 x 1,080. Nvidia cranked the demo up to 2,560 x 1,600 but would not reveal the frame rate. This could have huge implications for in-game graphics, although as the system currently requires 4 parallel Quadro GPUs with 1GB memory apiece, costing around $US 10,000 a pop it may be a couple of years before this hits even the most hardcore PC gamer's desktop.

Quoth Nvidia, "the ray tracer shows linear scaling rendering of a highly complex, two-million polygon, anti-aliased automotive styling application". Which certainly sounds impressive. What this appears to mean is "Look! A shiny car that we can move around real quick!" and, you know, that may well be enough.

Nvidia demos real-time GPU ray tracing at 1,920 x 1,080 [CustomPC]

Graphics card manufacturer NVIDIA bought PhysX cards creators AGEIA back in February, promising a free upgrade to existing GeForce 8 and above cards using their CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) interface down the line. Well we are now sufficiently down the line, as NVIDIA has released the first of many planned GeForce Power Packs (grab it here), which not only enables the technology but also gives you some nifty tools to explore it with.

Included in the first Power Pack is a complete version of Warmonger, one of the original showcases for the PhysX technology, an Unreal Tournament 3 PhysX Mod Pack with three maps, sneak peeks at Unreal Engine 3 powered social networking service Nurien, a couple of tech demos, and the drivers to make the whole thing go. Hit the jump for more info on this rather impressive update.

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We're a great deal savvier than we used to be about PC hardware. No longer are the insides of a computer scary - merely dark and, depending on how neat you are, dusty. Sure, you might scratch yourself on a sharp piece of metal, or procure a burn from a toasty heatsink, but any gamer who's owned a system longer than five years has earned his licence to fly solo in the bowels of his silicon beast.

Titles such as Crysis have raised awareness of Direct3D 10, while Supreme Commander proved that dual and quad core processors have a place in the motherboard of the average gamer.

It's a shame then that it's become progressively harder to identify which graphics cards or processors are better, thanks to the irrelevancy of megahertz and esoteric product names packed with hyperbole. Is an Intel E6600 better than a Q6600, because E comes first in the alphabet? Shouldn't a GeForce 9600GT be faster than an 8800GT by the difference of 800 "whatevers" in its name? The answer would be "no" in both cases.

I recently made a few purchases for my brother, whose AMD-based system finally decided that being a working PC wasn't hip any more. As part of the process, I had to put together a few parts that would serve him for the next few years, but wouldn't leave him scrounging his pocket lint for food money.

Anyway, hit the jump for my recommendations.

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Whey-hey, new graphics cards. Time to simultaneously drool over performance specs while complaining about the financial outlay required to satisfy said drooling! NVIDIA has debuted its new GTX 200-series line of graphics cards today, with the announcement of the GTX-260 and GTX-280. Here's the technical skinny: The 260 has 192 stream processors and 896MB of memory, while the 280 has 240 stream processors and 1GB of memory. Click through for a benchmark, highlight of which is the fact the god-like 9800 GX2 still has both these cards beat.

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I've raved about NVIDIA's 8800GT chip before. For less than $200, you can get yourself a 3D card with comparable performance to the company's top-of-the-line $400-$500 offerings. Bang, meet buck.

Hardware review site HardOCP decided to put the 8800GT, along with newer models like the 9800GTX and 9600GT, against Funcom's recently released MMO Age of Conan. The game is one of the prettier online titles available at the moment, so concerns about aging video cards is certainly warranted. If you bought a GeForce 8800GT back when supplies were low, is it a purchase you should be regretting now?

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NVIDIA head honcho Roy Taylor foresees the end of PC exclusive titles as the value and quality of video game consoles continues to improve, but he is not afraid. Speaking to Eurogamer, Taylor puts a shiny happy spin on the situation, envisioning a future where PC and console gamers can play the same games in happy co-existence.

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PC Call of Duty 4 gamers can download four maps free in an NVIDIA-sponsored Variety Map Pack due to drop Thursday.

The four maps for Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare are the Broadcast, Chinatown, Killhouse and Creek maps. Furthermore, PC players will get a patch that fixes a server crash, fixes some other bugs, adds in some things and, oh yeah, enables support for the new maps.

So, PC gamers, don't say nobody never did nuthin' for ya. Xbox 360 owners had to buy this. Enjoy!

Variety Map Pack Sponsored by NVIDIA hits PC June 5th [IAMfourzerotwo]

Every year, BusinessWeek put together their InfoTech 100, a ranking of the year's 100 best-performing technology companies. Seeing as 99% of you couldn't give a rat's arse about technology stocks, yes, I'm posting this for the game-related content. Three gaming companies made the cut, with Nintendo managing a very respectable fourth-spot finish, behind only Amazon, Apple and Research In Motion (the Blackberry guys). The other gaming companies were Activision, who came 42nd, and Nvidia (yes, I'm counting them as primarily games-based), who came in at #59.

BusinessWeek Infotech 100 [BusinessWeek]

NVIDIA's Roy Taylor is not, as you can probably hazard a guess, a fan of piracy in the PC games market. So much so that, while speaking with Eurogamer, he's made an impassioned plea, employing the language of the youth of today in order to get his point across:

I think that we've arrived at a point now where I don't know how anyone could ever possibly justify pirating a game. I just don't know how anyone could consider that a cool thing to do - it's not. It sucks.

It's not "regrettable". It's not "unfortunate". It sucks! The point of this spiel? To advocate a tightening of authentication measures, of course, such as those being employed by the upcoming Mass Effect port, as well as the idea of games being sold as a "basic service", with all future content, patches, etc, being made available only to those with authentic copies of a game.

NVIDIA bombards PC game pirates [Eurogamer]