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....

Hello world, ATI Radeon 4850 and 4870, and not a moment too soon. Not that nVidia's new 260 and 280 aren't wonderful pieces of technology, because they most assuredly are. However, if they had merely arrived at the top of the heap and remained unchallenged, what reason would there have been for the next big thing to come out of the Green Spiral Eyeball?After all, it seems like just a week or two ago we were complaining about how a lack of innovation and market pressure might cause stagnation in some sector or other the hardware universe, huh? This sort of prompt industry response can make a guy think he's got some sort of cosmic influence or something; BI will endeavor not to let it go to his head.When the NDA lifted this week, we were treated to an avalanche of release coverage. We have not been able to conduct our own hands-on review of this newest bit of shiny silicon (okay, there's the ego check we so desperately needed), but a lot of other sites dedicated to hardware news and reviews -- a list of them appears after the break -- have had it in their labs. To that end, we'll give you folks a quick performance summary and touch on some of the tech highlights the Radeon 4800 features....

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....

In the wake of this week's big hardware news -- nVidia's launch of the 200 series of graphics cards -- we, the hardware enthusiast community, are pushed one step closer to an approaching and annoying precipice. There is, unfortunately for those who want the best of both worlds, an impending schism between Intel and nVidia, which is liable to leave users in the unenviable position of having to make a fairly large choice or compromise.Do you want to use the most powerful CPU soon to be available (Intel's upcoming Nehalem) or the most powerful video card implementations (nVidia's SLI)? However, if the current corporate stalemate doesn't resolve, you can have one or the other, but not both.Let's all take a few minutes to say a few things that shouldn't be heard by polite company. I'll wait. Hell, I'll offer suggestions....

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....

As gamers, unless you're a Minesweeper junkie with an epic Peggle jones and no further aspirations, you're going to have to have a dedicated video card in your rig to get any kind of decent graphic performance. Wait, what? The short answer for why that's the case is: "Math is hard; let's go shopping." However, it's not us saying that, it's the CPU.I know what you're thinking. "BI, the central processing unit... all it does is math!" Or perhaps, "You cheap bastard, you still owe me five bucks for your share of the beer last week." You're right, of course (about the CPU, anyway...). In terms of raw computational horsepower, a modern processor is a potent customer. However, of necessity, it's also a generalist. In order to obtain truly prodigious performance, we need to bring in a specialist. That specialist is your video card. Think of it like this -- an Olympic decathlon competitor is in phenomenally good shape, and a world-class performer in ten different events, but in any single one of those, their lunch will be summarily eaten by someone who makes that their sole pursuit....

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....

It's really too bad that some muscular purple elf is already using this as his catchphrase, because, looking at the hardware recommendations for Age of Conan, a whole lot of folks are not prepared, at least when it comes to being able to turn up the bells and whistles when they visit Hyborea, whether it's just for 250 hours or a whole lot longer.From the pre-release notes' FAQ (question 1.10):Required 3GHz Pentium IV 1GB RAM NVIDIA GeForce 5800 or ATI 9800 Recommended Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4 GHz (E6600) or better 2GB+ RAM NVIDIA GeForce 7950GX2 or better Sorry, Mom, that vintage eMachine I gave you so you could check your email just ain't gonna cut it. I don't think that iMac you got to replace it is going to work, either....

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....

One of Valve's biggest benefits it gets from its Steam download service is finding out exactly what people have in their PC rigs via a voluntary survey. Today Valve released the latest results of their hardware survey (covering the period between Nov. 15, 2008 and May 15, 2008).The results make for some fascinating reading and speculation. Among the highlights: Intel accounts for 58.48 percent of PC processors in the survey compared to AMD's 41.51 percent Video cards based on NVIDIA Geforce chips took up the top eight places on the survey list; the highest ATI based card was the Radeon 9600. Gamers still apparently have small monitors for the most part; the highest percentage is for 16 inch monitors with 25.8 percent. Only 6 71 percent of survey owners have monitors that are larger that 21 inches. 64.49 percent of PC owners in the Steam survey have microphones Windows XP still is installed in a whopping 80.92 percent of PCs in the survey; over a year after its launch Windows Vista is installed in only 17.61 percent of PCs (that includes the 64-bit version) 32.59 percent of PC owners in the Valve survey have hard drives that are higher than 250 GB. ...

A few weeks ago Ubisoft announced that it would release a patch for their PC ports of their highly successful stealth action game Assassin's Creed. However, instead of fixing bugs or adding new features, the patch is to remove the support for DirectX10.1 graphics. According to the initial announcement about the patch the DirectX10.1 support in the game added "a render pass during post-effect which is costly."While the patch has yet to be released as of this writing, some are accusing Ubisoft of playing hardware politics with this proposed DirectX10.1 removal from the game. Why? Because at the moment the only graphics cards in stores that support DirectX10.1 are cards from AMD's ATI unit (specifically the Radeon HD 3000 hardware). Performance issues with Assassin's Creed were reported on NVIDIA graphics cards. The problem is that Assassin's Creed is part of NVIDIA's "The Way It's Meant To Be Played" marketing program where the company makes deals with game publishers to add their logo and ad support for a number of PC games.So did NVIDIA ask Ubisoft to remove the DirectX10.1 feature from Assassin's Creed? Officially the answer is, "No." TG Daily contacted both Ubisoft and NVIDIA reps and both denied any sort of external influence, saying that the decision was made by the game's development team. The author feels that the game simply was not finished in terms of proper code and that the programming team put in the DirectX10.1 support without making sure the game would work on normal DirectX10 hardware. It just goes to prove that developing PC games without taking the tons of different hardware combinations can still be tricky....