Once again AMD has released their latest monthly refresh of their ATI Radeon Catalyst graphics drivers. The 8.7 version of the drivers can be download at ATI's game web site. The new drivers add support for new Linux based operating systems like the Ubuntu 8.04, SLED 10 sp2, and Open Suse 11.For good old fashioned Windows users, the new Catalyst 8.7 drivers have a number of performance improvements in games like Lost Planet, Company of Heroes and Call of Duty 4. The drivers also fix bugs for games like Crysis. Assassin's Creed, Frontlines: Fuel of War, Rainbow Six Vegas 2, World in Conflict, World of Warcraft, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, City of Heroes and other PC game titles...

With the anti-trust suit against Nvidia and ATI still raging (which alleges the two kept prices artificially high by releasing products at the same time and at very similar prices) it was really bad timing for an unwanted Email to surface. Especially when the Email in question was written by Nvidia's Dan Vivoli to ATI's Dave Orton.Apparently as far back as 2002 (the suit has been going on since '06) the two graphic card giants were talking about alinging their marketing plans. The Email from Vivoli to Orton stated: "I really think we should work harder together on the marketing front. As you and I have talked about, even though we are competitors, we have the common goal of making our category a well positioned, respected playing field. $5 and $8 stocks are a result of no respect."Nvidia's stock at the close of market today was a "whopping" $11.56 while ATI's (now owened by AMD) was a "stunning" $4.65. Um, there still doesn't appear to be much respect for these guys. Where's Rodney Dangerfield when you need him?...

It's never a good think to miss your financial goals on the stock market. PC graphics chip maker Nvidia found that our the hard way today. Late on Thursday the company announced it will miss its projected revenues for the just finished second quarter by about $200 million thanks in part to reducing prices for chips to compete with AMD's new products as well as a one-time charge to fix a defect in an older notebook chip.That piece of news sent Nvidia's stock way down today on the NASDAQ market. Even though trading was cut short several hours because of Friday's Independence Day holiday, Nvidia's stock went down 30.73 percent to settle at $12.49 a share. In addition to the bad financial news from the company, several financial analysts downgraded the company's stock today ahead of trading....

PC graphics chip maker Nvidia has been riding high lately with impressive revenue figures in the last several financial quarters. Now it looks like the company has hit a bit of a speed bump as it announced late on Wednesday that it will not make its previous predictions for revenue for the quarter that just ended on June 30.Previously Nvidia predicted the quarter would generate revenues of about $1.1 billion but now that has been revised with numbers between $875 million to $950 million. Part of the reason is that Nvidia was forced to lower prices faster than expected on its high end chips to compete with new ATI chips from its main rival AMD. Nvidia will also take a one time charge of between $150 million to $200 million to deal with a hardware issue in some of its older notebook graphics chips. Nvidia's stock price is expected to take a hit later this morning when official trading begins; after-hours trading saw the stock plunge as much as 20 percent on the news....

Last week, AMD revealed what game graphics might look like with demos of their new graphics chip that was code named "NV770". Today the company officially revealed their next generation high end ATI branded graphics chips. The Radeon HD 4800 series are designed not just to be fast PC graphics chips for gaming they are supposed to be affordable. The high end Radeon HD 4870 comes in at $299. This compares to Nvidia's just announced GeForce GTX 280 which comes in at $600.Already web sites like FiringSquad, HardOCP and others are praising the new ATI chips based on running benchmarks of both the 4870 and the cheaper 4850 model. The sites stated that both chips give tons of performance for the cost compared to the competition at Nvidia. AMD has also released some new "hotfix" drivers for the 4870 and 4850 models that improve stablility and performance. You can download them at AMD's web site....

Is the PC gaming industry dying? According to a recently revealed new non-profit organization, the answer is a resounding "No!". The PC Gaming Alliance was first announced last February at a press conference at GDC with companies that normally compete with each other. Hardware companies like Intel, Nvidia, AMD, Acer, Dell and Antec are full members and game software developer/publishers like Microsoft, Epic Games and Activision are also members of the group (contributors include Capcom, Razer, Logitech, the Guildhall at SMU, Wildtangent, and the Entertainment Merchants Association).So what is this diverse group doing to promote PC gaming? The organization is aiming to come up with ways to improve marketing for PC gaming, trying to fight new ways to combat PC game piracy and looking to do research into PC game revenues beyond the normal retail sales. Perhaps their most important mission is to establish a minimal hardware requirement for a PC to run most games and to create guidelines for game developers to have their games run well on that minimal platform.While the PC Gaming Alliance is still working on these matters (they are planning to announced their first study results in August), Big Download wanted to get an update on the organization and its progress. We sent some questions to the group's president Randy Stude (who in his day job is the director of the Gaming Program Office for Intel) to see if we can get a sense of what the organization is doing and how they feel about recent criticism from game developer Valve Software. ...

It's a new one-two punch if you happen to own the right graphics card. AMD has just released their new monthly Catalyst drivers for their ATI based Radeon graphics chips. The 8.6 versions of the drivers can be downloaded at AMD's game web site and the release notes show a number of fixes and improvements for a large number of games in both XP and Vista, including BioShock, Sins of a Solar Empire, Call of Duty 4, Lost Planet, Crysis and others.Not to be outdone, Nvidia has also released new Forceware drivers specifically for their new Geforce GTX 280 and 260 graphics chips. The new 177.35 version of the drivers also support the new nForce 780a and 750a SLI motherboards for their HybridPower features (Vista OS only). Keep in mind that this new driver release is only for the new Geforce chips; older chips are not officialy supported....

On Monday Nvidia officially announced their newest and most powerful PC graphics chip yet, the GeForce GTX 280. Today it's time for their main rival AMD to toot their own horn. While the company did not officially announce an actual graphic chip just yet they did showcase what that chip, code named RV770, will be able to do at a press event late on Monday night. AMD claims that the RV770 chip will be able to process one teraflop of info and used it to show a live graphics demo that ran on a single PC with two such chips in place along with a AMD Phenom X4 quad-core processor and 790 FX Chipset.As you can see from the screenshots from the graphics demo the visuals that AMD generated are pretty impressive. According to the press release the chip, once it becomes available, will be "more powerful than every generation of video game console ever brought to market combined." That's pretty strong words but we will soon see if AMD can match those words when the chip is officially announced and launched later this summer....

It's Bill Murrary's Ghostbusters quote time,:"Dogs and cats living together . . . mass hysteria!". That's how it seems to feel when early this morning a press release from AMD announced that it would be working with the game physics software company Havok "to jointly investigate the optimization of physics effects utilizing AMD's full line of products." Why is this odd? Because Havok was purchased in late 2007 by Intel, AMD's number one rival in the PC processor business.According to the note, "Havok and AMD plan to further optimize the full range of Havok technologies on AMD x86 superscalar processors." AMD apparently believes Havok's solution is better than its main rival PhysX which was bought by Nvidia, AMD's main rival in the graphics chip business, earlier this year. It looks like AMD decided it couldn't create its own physics solution and went with Intel's Havok, which recently released its PC physics SDK for free for non-commercial uses....

Back in February at GDC the PC Gaming Alliance was first announced. The non-profit organization of game publishers like Activision, EA, Microsoft and hardware companies like Intel, Nvidia, AMD and others was charged to defend the PC as a gaming platform via efforts to create a hardware standard for developers to use and to find out how big the market actually is. Little info on the PC Gaming Alliance has been revealed since the February launch. Today News.com chatted with the organization's president Randy Stute who revealed that they plan to announce their first results for their inital look in the industry in August.Those results will include a more comphehensive look at global PC gaming hardware and software sales as well as a timeline to reveal when the organization will announced the mimimal PC gaming hardware specs. In the interview Stute pretty much slams the reporting of the NPD Group for until recently underreporting the extent of PC game revenues. Recently the NPD Group revealed that there was $1 billion generated for online revenues in gaming and Stute stated, "So if you add the billion dollars they claim to have found in annual subscription revenues on top of the $920 million that they were previously reporting in retail, suddenly the PC game piece of the pie is closer to a quarter of all software revenues generated in North America. That's one platform out of eight that's generating a quarter of all the revenues."...

Microsoft and AMD are participating in and providing funding to the fifth annual Games for Change festival next week. Both companies are funding the development of games that promote peace and green living. They'll also be training youth in game development so they can make their own alternative games. AMD is funding its initiative through its newly-formed AMD Foundation.The video game industry is filled with extremely violent games. While there's nothing wrong with that so long as parents, publishers, and retailers are responsible about who they encourage to play those titles, it's always pleasing to see the industry branch out to other motifs. PC gaming in particular has a long history of excellent non-violent releases, such as Myst, Railroad Tyccon, and The Sims....

It's that time of the month . . . no, get your head out of the gutter. AMD's ATI division has released their regular monthly update of their Catalyst drivers. This is the 8.5 verson of the drivers that support all of ATI's Radeon graphics chips. The release notes for the new drivers reveal what's been changed and/or fixed in this newest release. Gamers will note performace improvements in the DirectX10 modes for Lost Planet , World in Conflict and Call of Juarez. In addition Windows Vista bugs have been fixed for a wide variety of titles including Crysis, Hellgate London, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars and more. Windows XP bugs for Crysis, World of Warcraft and more have also been fixed....

The intense "war" between rival PC graphics chip makers NVIDIA and AMD (the later the parent company of ATI) will enter a new round in June, according to News.com. The companies plan to introduce new graphics chips families that month with NVIDIA launching the GeForce GTX 200 and AMD/ATI revealing the Radeon HD 4800. According to the article the ATI chip should launch first with the Radeon HD 4850 and the Radeon HD 4870 versions (both priced in the mid-range of graphics chips) while the higher end ATI Radeon 4870 X2 due out later this fall. Less is known about the GeForce GTX 200 family from NVIDIA which is on the high end of the market. Naturally neither NVIDIA nor AMD have officially announced their plans for their new products....

A few months ago, a number of PC gaming hardware and game publishers launched the non-profit PC Gaming Alliance, designed to both help promote PC gaming as well as solve some of the issues that are currently plaguing the industry (hardware compatibility and piracy being the top two concerns). One of the members of the Alliance is AMD and this morning the PC graphics chip and processor company announced a program called simply AMD Game that is being designed to help consumers purchase PCs for gaming purposes.The press release states that a study by Jon Peddie Research indicated that two-thirds of all PCs sold in 2007 has just the basics in terms of hardware and were not able to really give a solid gaming PC experience. The AMD Game logo will be put on hardware and components that the company feels will give consumers a clue that these products will be suited for gaming. Hardware retailers like Newegg and TigerDirect and gaming PC makers like Alienware, Velocity Micro and others will sell PCs with the AMD Game logo. The company has even posted up info on several hardware configurations for PCs that could be used to make high-powered gaming PCsOf course, all of these is designed to also help AMD sell more hardware to consumers; they make both processors under the AMD name and graphics chips under the ATI brand. Having a gaming PC with an AMD made motherboard, processor and graphics chip makes things simple for buyers and gets AMD more money. They need it to to compete with Intel on the processor side and NVIDIA on the graphics side. Will Intel and NVIDIA also launch their own similar program? That's a good question......

What is the next leap that is needed for gaming-oriented PCs? According to Dell's gaming PC subsidiary Alienware it's not a faster processor or graphics card but moving to a more powerful operating system. In a new News.com article Alienware's desktop product manager Marc Diana says the major PC hardware companies (Microsoft, Intel, NVIDIA, AMD) need to move collectively to fully support 64-bit based operating systems.Ever since the release of Windows 95 13 years ago, most PC games have supported 32-bit based OSs with only a few that have fully supported 64-bit systems natively. In fact Diana admits Alienware doesn't even bother to offer 64-bit based PCs because the driver support for such a system isn't available, in their opinion. Yet going to a 64-bit OS would not only increase performance for PCs in theory it would also allow gaming PCs to have memory that can break the current 4GB limit that 32-bit OS have.Diana said other factors could also help in making more powerful PCs in the future including moving to DDR3-based memory that use less power but are clocked higher than DDR2-based memory. At the moment DDR3-based memory is still much more expensive than the norm....