Geforce posts

The same week that graphics chip maker Nvidia launched its new high end GeForce GTX 580 graphics card, the company is also making a new push to promote its products to PC gamers. Nvidia has now launched GeForce.com, replacing its earlier Nzone.com site as its main portal to promote PC gaming and its hardware.

The site contains news and interviews centered around PC gaming and hardware. There are also optimization guides for Nvidia's desktop GPU and direct downloads of Nvidia's GeForce drivers. The site also contains downloadable game demos and tech demos including the Endless City tech demo that was just released as part of the GeForce GTX 580 graphics card.

Nvidia has mostly been behind its main rival AMD of late in terms of claiming the title of fastest PC graphics card in the world. Today Nvidia makes its new bid for that title with its newest product, the GeForce GTX 580 graphics card. Compared to its last flagship card, the GeForce GTX 480, this new card has more CUDA cores and a rise in its clock speed to 1.54 Ghz.

Nvidia says that makes the new card 15 to 20 percent faster than the 480. It's also been redesigned to actually use less power, to use less heat and be quiete than the older card as well. Online reviews from various hardware sites seem to prove that this new product beat Nvidia's previous best. It also beats AMD's new Radeon HD 5870 card although not by much. The card is now on sale at some retailers for $499.

[Via Engadget]

Something tells us that if Valve ever decided to give specific numbers on how many PC and Mac games are sold on its Steam download service on a yearly basis it would make Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo wet their pants ... yes, it's a metaphor.

• Nvidia has released new official 260.89 WHQL-certified GeForce graphics card drivers on its web site.
• Assassin's Creed Brotherhood is apparently doing well in the pre-sell business.
• The first annual Canadian Games Conference has been announced and will be held in Vancouver in May.
• The indie game The Path was the winner of the Advancement Prize in the 2010 European Innovative Games Awards.

Today the PC graphics chip make Nvidia is releasing a new product, the GeForce GT 430 graphics card. The mainstream graphics card (it will be sold under $100 in most retailers) is also the occasion for a new GeForce desktop driver update.Nvidia has now released the 260.89 drivers in beta form.

The new beta drivers increase performance in certain games with PCs containing Nvidia 400-based graphics cards. Games like StarCraft II get up to a 19 percent performance with the beta drivers, depending on what graphics card is used. It also adds 3D Vision support for a new set of PC monitors and a number of games including Fallout New Vegas, Lost Planet 2, Arcania: Gothic 4 and more.

[Via Blue's News]

Last March, after several delays, Nvidia finally launched their first DirectX 11 PC graphics card products with the GeForce GTX 480 and GeForce GTX 470, However those products are on the high end in terms of price. Today Nvidia officially announced the launch of their mainstream DirectX 11-based card, the GeForce GTX 465.

Priced at around $279 (depending on which third party graphics card company you pick) the GeForce GTX 465 has 1 GB of memory and a 607MHz clock speed. Of course it support's Nvidia's SLI tech as well as PhysX and 3D Vision. Our sister site Engadget has a collection of early review links from hardware sites and for the most part they have been positive (although the card is a power hog).

AMD is currently leading the next-gen PC graphics card race with its recent ATI Radeon products that support DirectX 11. However Nvidia has been hinting that their own entry in the race, known both as Fermi and the GF100, will also be a powerful chip. Today an embargo was lifted and a number of hardware based web sites got to reveal info they learned about the upcoming chip from Nvidia.

Unfortunately, Nvidia is still keeping some major details of the upcoming graphics chips secret including a launch date, clock speed, and the big one: cost. However it has revealed some technical details on the chip itself which suggests it will be twice as powerful as Nvidia's current champion, the GT200. Firing Squad reports that Nvidia claims the chip will run Far Cry 2 at 84.3 frames per second with 1920x1200 resolution with 4xAA/16xAF. Dark Void ran at 76.82 frames per second at the same settings. You can see a demo of in-engine graphics running on the chip above.

It's yet another case of a double whammy of graphics card driver updates today. AMD's ATI unit has just released their official Catalyst 9.12 drivers for their Radeon based video cards. The release notes for their final major driver release have all the details about what's new and improved including a slight performance boost for S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat. By the way, there's also supposed to be a beta patch that will fix the ATI issues with running The Saboteur on Friday.

ATI's biggest rival Nvidia has also released new beta drivers for its GeForce family of graphics chips today. Among other things the 195.81 beta drivers add new SLI support for a number of recently released PC game demos such as the demos for Avatar and Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising.

You may remember us reporting a little while ago that Nvidia was going to use Halloween to launch some kind of new product connected to their PhysX support. Well, that product is now outed as graphics card maker EVGA has announced the GTX 275 Co-op, a new card that has a chip dedicated just to hardware-accelerated game physics support.

The GTX 275 has a Nvidia GTX 275 graphics chip just for GPU duties plus another Nvidia chip, the GTS 250, that's set up specifically as a PhysX chip only. The card also has SLI support which means you can have three GPUs plus the extra just for PhysX support.. As you can see the card has the Joker's face just waiting to give you the creeps as EVGA and Nvidia are branding this card as the perfect way to play the PhysX-supported Batman: Arkham Asylum. Pricing for the card will be a bit high (over $300) but it looks like Batman: Arkham Asylum will be bundled with the card.

[Via PC Percepective]

AMD has the current edge over its main rival Nvidia in the PC graphics card race. AMD's new DirectX11-based cards under their ATI brand are out now while Nvidia's DirectX11 cards are not expected to launch until sometime in early 2010. However, Nvidia is apparently prepping some kind of new graphics card product for a launch this fall.

This week Nvidia sent out invites for people to come to their Santa Clara, California offices on October 30 for a Halloween-themed launch event that will introduce "a rocking new graphics card designed by NVIDIA and EVGA to take PhysX to the next level." That's all we know at this point but if you happen to be in the area on that date there may still be time to send in your RSVP.

It's time to get your Nvidia GeForce-based graphics cards updated to the latest drivers (if you have them installed of course). The graphics card company has now issued their new official update with their 191.07 version of the drivers. They come in Windows XP, Vista and 7 flavors (32-bit and 64-bit for each).

The release notes for the new drivers show that a number of PC games get some performance improvements including a 12 percent performance upgrade in ArmA II. The new official drivers also carry over performance increases in a number of games from a previous beta driver release. In addition the new drivers add SLI support for a number of new and upcoming games including Aion, Dreamkiller and others.