amd posts

While not nearly as big as E3 for the gaming industry, the annual Consumer Electronics Show can be a place for some interesting gaming related product announcements. The previous show, for example, had the debut of Alienware's popular M11x gaming PC laptop and the announcement of a motion sensing PC game controller from Razer (which as of this writing has yet to be released).

The 2011 edition of CES will be held in Las Vegas on January 6-11 and the show will once again have its own game-based section called the CES Gaming Showcase. AMD, Intel, Logitech, Microsoft and others will have gaming related exhibits at the show. And for you console gamers out there Nintendo will also be exhibiting at CES 2011. This will be the first time that Nintendo has come to CES in 16 years.

[Via email press release]

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]

As promised earlier this week AMD has now officially launched its second generation DirectX 11 graphics cards, the Radeon 6800 series. It's also the first graphics card from AMD that won't be using the ATI branding. The first graphics cards are being targets for the "mainstream" user. The Radeon HD 6850 has 1GB of memory and a 775MHz graphics processor for $180. The more expensive ($240) Radeon HD 6870 has a higher clock speed of 900MHz.\

Hardware sites like HardOCP, AnandTech and other are generally positive, saying the performance of the new Radeon cards beat those of Nvidia's in the same price bracket. New Radeon cards made for the extreme hardcore game (i.e. more expensive) are due to be released later this year.

Last year, AMD was the first company to offer DirectX 11-based graphics cards to PC gamers, beating its main rival Nividia by several months. One year later, AMD is about to release the next generation of its Radeon DirectX 11 graphics cards. It will also be the first Radeon cards to not use the ATI branding which AMD has decided to abandon.

Our sister site Engadget reports that the first two cards from AMD will be the Radeon HD 6870 and Radeon HD 6850. You can see the 6870 card in the above image but beyond that AMD is keeping the technical details on both cards, including pricing, under an embargo. More info will be revealed on the new cards on Friday.

Up until now Valve's Steam download service has been mostly for downloading games, demos, movies and strategy guides. Today it was announced that the service will be used by processor maker AMD for another purpose. If you have an ATI Radeon-based graphics card in your PC, Steam will automatically detect that and make available the latest driver updates for your graphics card.

This will certainly be a huge benefit for Steam owners which those graphics cards since many issues with PC games can be solved with a graphics driver update. The updates will begin later this month with the release of the 10.9 version of the Catalyst drivers. Ironically this announcement comes on the heals of the word that AMD intends to dump the ATI brand name for its graphics cards by the end of the year.

Update: Those 10.9 drivers are now available to download via Steam and from AMD's Game web site.

In 2006, PC processor maker AMD made huge headlines with its acquisition of the ATI PC graphics chip and card business for $5.4 billion. Now, four years later, AMD has decided the ATI brand name has served its purpose and will phase out the use of the ATI brand name later this year.

While the ATI brand is going away, AMD will still retain the Radeon brand for its consumer graphics chips and boards. All of AMD's current graphics products will still have the ATI brand, presumably until they are phased out. According to AnandTech, AMD is also simplifying its brands across the board in 2011 with the Vision name as the only one that will be used for all of its CPU products.

While Blizzard released a "day one" patch for StarCraft II when the game was first launched last Tuesday, today Blizzard issued its first patch for the sci-fi RTS sequel since its released. Patch 1.01, which can be downloaded via the game's auto updater, "addresses a few technical issues and makes some server-side optimizations," according to the game's official web site. In addition, "campaign saves have been optimized" for the patch and it also "fixed an issue with sound not playing on some 7.1 systems."

In related news, AMD has issued a hotfix for its ATI Catalyst drivers for the Radeon graphics cards. Among other things, the hotfix enables anti-aliasing features in StarCraft II for PCs with Radeon based graphics chips (thanks Blue's News for that link).

The PC processor and graphics chip maker AMD is in a bit of a pickle. It makes processors that are second to Intel in terms of market share and while its ATI division has been making progress on its biggest rival Nvidia in terms of performance Nvidia's graphic chips are still the market leader for PC gaming. Now AMD has announced a new marketing program that's aimed specifically at PC gamers.

The marketing program is called Gaming Evolved and according to AMD's web site, the program is all about one thing, "Gamers Come First". The site adds, "We will listen carefully to gamers, create solutions and technologies that closely align to their wants and needs, and fulfill our "Gamers Come First!" mandate to the PC gamers of the world." The site also says AMD will listen to game developers as well, saying, "We will deliver the technical support and guidance needed to adopt new technologies like Direct X 11, and provide the indispensible business support that game developers need to help make their games a commercial success"." Big Download plans to contact AMD to get more concrete info on what its new Gaming Evolved program will mean to the PC games industry.

AMD's ATI graphics division is doing things a little earlier than normal this month with the release of their regular monthly update to its Catalyst drivers for their Radeon graphics chips. The 10.6 version of the drivers are now available to download via the AMD Game web site.

The release notes for the 10.6 drivers reveals that the new version has a number of PC games that get performance boosts if you have a CrossfireX PC set-up. Among the games that get some performance improvements are Batman: Arkham Asylum, Company of Heroes, Dirt 2, Crysis Warhead and World in Conflict.

[Via Blue's News]

PC gamers are now more likely to have a PC rig that supports at least a DirectX 10 video card, according to the latest hardware survey monthly update on the Steam PC game download service. The latest update shows that 56.47 percent of Steam PC users have either a DirectX 10 or DirectX 11-based video card with Windows Vista or Windows 7. Another 21.55 percent of Steam PC owners have a DirectX 10/11 supported card while still running Windows XP, which is DirectX 9 only.

The rest of the survey shows some expected results including Nvidia graphics card and Intel processors in the vast majority of PC systems. Systems with more than one GPU are in a very small minority; just 1.79 percent of systems have such a set-up.