Actually, Windows 7 uses similar GPU-acceleration in many areas.

In fact, separate software utilities from ATI and Nvidia that accomplish this have been out for QUITE a while now for Windows.

Wow, people don't know what they're talking about. OpenCL is a library that can compute things on the GPU (graphics card) instead of the CPU. So, with OpenCL the computations associated with encoding/decoding video that are more efficiently run on GPU's are run on the GPU instead of the CPU, hence the performance boost. This means two things:

1) This statement makes no sense whatsoever:
"...and most users don't have four cores to play with..."
Speed of GPU operations have pretty much no correlation with CPU or how many cores it has.

2) Apple didn't do anything exceptional here. The simply ported two processes to a new library that is faster, that is all. Actually, the 50% increase in performance is pretty much nothing. Try encoding/decoding with an ATI/Nvidia Windows tool, the improvement is much more than 50%.

This kind of on-GPU performance optimization has been around for a few years now. CUDA ring a bell? how about ATI Stream? The important thing here is this:
OpenCL is OPEN, it doesn't matter what vendor you got your GPU from, if it's OpenCL-compatible, it will be MUCH faster with OpenCL apps than just your CPU. This is why software developers especially (good job Apple) should be using OpenCL over CUDA or Stream,

@Mike
They've been rebranding for a while now the 9800GT and GTS 240 GPUs are just an 8800GT that's overclocked. The 9600 and GTS 250 are also rebrands. I think even the 9400 is just an 8600 GPU. The amount of innovation at nvidia is comprised entirely of the GTX260 Core 216, GTX275, and GTX285 (the 295 is just 2 285's slapped together). It's starting to get ridiculous.

So now, I can't wait (sarcasm) for a rebranding of ALL of their graphics cards which will apparently make it easier for us to distinguish what's what. I think the end-goal here is for them to be able to sell us the same shit for the fourth generation of GPUs now. Meanwhile ATI has been innovating with each new generation.

First off, I think Songbird is a fantastic media player, and supports an excellent feature set, whereas iTunes is a pile of utter trash.

However, Palm using iTunes as it's primary sync software is a very smart move. They may say they're not competing with Apple, but they obviously know they are. The reason I say 'obviously' here is because I think they planned to have iTunes be the sole way to sync so that consumers would draw comparisons in a thoughtful way about the iPhone and Pre, treating them as if they are of the same class (which they are). I think Palm realizes that the average consumer, for some reason, treats Apple products like they are a separate class of product, not to be compared with their competition. Look at the perspective on Zune vs. iPod: the Zune is a perfectly good player that can compete on the same level as an iPod (not in market share, though), but no one gives it that much credit.

Palm knows that once people start drawing these comparisons, they will start seeing Palm as a credible competitor, as opposed to seeing Apple as if it were unstoppably good.

On top of that, Palm knows that when Pre's stop syncing with iTunes, 90% of their customers will blame Apple, not Palm. The lack of sync capability is just going to get customers frustrated with Apple, not Palm.

Agreed. It's Sony's time to shine. Natal, to me, does not look like it will be enjoyable to use. It looks even more gimmicky and less tangible than the Wii's motion control.

On top of that, Xbox 360's capabilities, as far as graphics go, have already been met by the games currently offered. Playstation 3, however, is nowhere close. The reason it seems like the PS3 is being pushed by current graphics is because developers haven't been able to fully utilize the power of the PS3. Sony did this on purpose: they made the SDK difficult to develop with so that over time it would appear that the graphics just kept improving instead of plateau-ing like the 360 already has.

Wow, you're ignorant. This is really important: DX11's compute shader technology allows for on-GPU calculations, which significantly accelerate computations due to the massively parallel nature of graphics cards, not only that but there are a host of games that support DX10, and a bunch that support DX10.1.

Not only that, but nVidia doesn't even support DX10.1 features, and they're likely just going to skip to DX11 (late, of course).

Oh, for reference, here's a list of DX10 games:
Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures, Alliance of Valiant Arms, Assassin's Creed, BattleForge, BioShock, Call of Juarez, Company of Heroes, Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts, Company of Heroes: Tales of Valor, Cryostasis: Sleep of Reason, Crysis, Crysis Warhead, Devil May Cry 4, Dungeons & Dragons Online: Stormreach, Far Cry 2, Flight Simulator X, Flight Simulator X: Acceleration, Gears of War, Hellgate: London, Lord Of The Rings Online: Shadows Of Angmar, Lost Planet: Extreme Condition, Prince of Persia, PT Boats: Knights of the Sea, Rise of the Argonauts, Shadowrun, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky, Stormrise, Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X., Universe at War: Earth Assault, World in Conflict, World in Conflict: Soviet Assault.

Not to mention the up-coming DX10 games:
Alan Wake, Arcania: A Gothic Tale, Chrome 2, Dragon Age: Origins, Duke Nukem Forever (vaporware? lol), Guild Wars 2, Mafia II, Shattered Horizon, Stargate Worlds, THEY, and Warhound

So, how important is the graphics framework Windows is built on? I'd say a smidgen. Now, I like OpenGL, but it's CLEAR that DirectX is integral to game development for MANY studios.

Oh, and I almost forgot: AMD provides the GPUs for Microsoft's Xbox 360 console, which runs on DirectX. So, it's kind of important that they're ahead of schedule.

A lot of Universities have solar car's. In Ontario, Canada: Queens, McMaster, UWaterloo, and I think UToronto have them...

notnews

"Luckily, the price is right: $239"

That price makes me want to throw up. On Dell. That is absolute garbage.

The 4GB of RAM wouldn't do anything at all in terms of gaming performance, even if this was a gaming oriented card. Games today don't need 4GB of RAM, there's no way that you will need to buffer that much data with the current state of in-game graphics.

This is a professional card, and nVidia is doing a good job of getting a lot of PR with it. Saying they have the fastest card (even if it's only a professional card) piques the interest of gamers and enthusiasts, even though there's no way that it would be useful or practical for gaming.

@E71
First of all, the graphics cards DO NOT take up 3 slots. They take up two. Secondly, they are not inefficiently designed, they are about the same size as nVidia's 280 graphics card and they have TWO GPUS on board each.

Yes, so taking up two slots for two GPUs just as high-end single GPU graphics cards take up two, is totally inefficient. Clearly you're running some fucking mainstream, mid-range, Intel integrated piece of shit or something. Either that or you don't understand efficiency.