video card
Latest
Engadget's recession antidote: win an 8GB Kingston SDHC Video card!
This whole global economic crisis, and its resulting massive loss of jobs got us thinking. We here at Engadget didn't want to stand helplessly by, announcing every new round of misery without giving anything back -- so we decided to take the opportunity to spread a little positivity. We'll be handing out a new gadget every day (except for weekends) to lucky readers until we run out of stuff or companies stop sending things. Today we've got an 8GB Kingston Technologies SDHC Video card on offer. Read the rules below (no skimming -- we're omniscient and can tell when you've skimmed) and get commenting! Hooray for free stuff!Big thanks to Kingston for providing the gear!The rules: Leave a comment below. Any comment will do, but if you want to share your proposal for "fixing" the world economy, that'd be sweet too. You may only enter this specific giveaway once. If you enter this giveaway more than once you'll be automatically disqualified, etc. (Yes, we have robots that thoroughly check to ensure fairness.) If you enter more than once, only activate one comment. This is pretty self explanatory. Just be careful and you'll be fine. Contest is open to anyone in the 50 States, 18 or older! Sorry, we don't make this rule (we hate excluding anyone), so be mad at our lawyers and contest laws if you have to be mad. Winner will be chosen randomly. The winner will receive one (1) Kingston Technologies SDHC video card. If you are chosen, you will be notified by email. Winners must respond within three days of the end of the contest. If you do not respond within that period, another winner will be chosen. Entries can be submitted until Tuesday, May, 12th, at 11:59PM ET. Good luck! Full rules can be found here.
AMD's 40nm ATI Radeon HD 4770 outed, slated for May release?
Ever since we saw the glowing review AMD's ATI Radeon RV740 prototype received, we've been looking forward to the day that the company would make one of these 40nm wonders available. It looks like that day might be close at hand -- according to these purloined slides, a little something called the ATI Radeon HD 4770 is due to make the scene next month in the $99 price point. This handsome lad sports GDDR5 memory, DirectX 10.1 support, a 750 MHz clock speed, a memory clock of 800 MHz using a 128-bit memory bus, a frame buffer size of 512 MB, and much, much more. Curious? Of course you are. Check the slides out below for all of the glorious details.[Via Tom's Hardware]
AMD's ATI FirePro 2450 quad-display card
It's a simple premise, and one that we wholeheartedly support: if a single display is good, two displays are doubleplusgood. AMD has always had our back in this regard, and now the company is back with further proof, in the form of a little something called the ATI FirePro 2450 video. This guy supports not two but four monitors, rocking either DVI or VGA, at up to 1920 x 1200 resolution, in a low profile form factor. The device includes support for DirectX 10.1, OpenGL 2.1 visual effects, and Microsoft Windows, and ships with 512MB of memory for $499. ATI points out that this device is aimed at "financial institutions," possibly a gift for your sweetheart in the foreign exchange market?[Via Electronista]
AMD's new ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4860 and HD 4830 chew pixels with 40nm teeth
ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4850 vs. ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4860 Don't get too comfy, NVIDIA. AMD showed up today with mobile video cards of its own, the new ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4860 and HD 4830. The cards are working off of AMD's new 40nm process, with DirectX 10.1 support, dual DisplayPort out and 1080p acceleration claims galore (or 2560 x 1600, if that's your thing). The 4860 sets itself apart with GDDR5 memory, and both cards do ATI PowerPlay, ATI PowerXpress and ATI Switchable Graphics for power saving and maximum buzzwordage. The cards will be first available in ASUS laptops in Q2 of this year.%Gallery-46447%
WoW Rookie: Will my computer run WoW?
New around here? WoW Rookie points WoW's newest players to the resources they need to get acclimated. Send us a note to suggest a WoW Rookie topic.Playing WoW is no fun at all if your system doesn't cut the mustard. If you've just started playing on hardware of questionable power, you may believe you're clicking along just fine -- only to watch your frame rate come to a grinding halt the first time you're faced with a raid or Battleground full of players moving, casting and otherwise wreaking havoc (to both the game environment and your system). Lots of players start out playing WoW on hand-me-down computer systems. In fact, the spouse who starts playing on an old hunk o' junk, only to become hooked and then upgrade to a hotter rig than that of the established player, has become something of a gaming cliché. The thing to remember here is that a system that will run WoW will not provide the same enjoyment as a system that runs it well.
The Queue: For poops and giggles
Welcome back to The Queue, WoW Insider's daily Q&A column where the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. I'm sure The Queue is the last thing you're all interested in the day the PTR goes up, but too bad! You get it anyway! Let's get the Q&A started, eh?Velina asked...I have a Shadow Priest I leveled to 34, then had her boosted to level 60 through Recruit-a-Friend level grants. She's now stuck in level 25-30-ish questing greens and SFK blues. I'm wondering what would be the best way to gear her. Would she be able to survive questing in Outland in her very low-level gear, or am I going to have to round up some gold for her?
Firecoder Blu, Thomson's SpursEngine graphics card, available in December
"Bag of hurt" or no, it doesn't look like Blu-ray is going to disappear any time soon. Firecoder Blu is Thomson's new graphics card aimed at the HD set, and the second one based on Toshiba's SpursEngine chip. Using same technology as the PS3, the chip is capable of hardware accelerated decoding of the MPEG2 and MPEG4 AVC/H.264 codecs, which lends the card some serious processing capabilities -- the company claims it will transcode AVCHD files to and from MPEG2 up to five times faster than real time. On sale in Japan for ¥52,290 (US$539), those of us in the States should see the card sometime in December for $599.[Via PC World]
Palit's Radeon HD 4870 X2 has preposterous clock speeds, marketing hype
Hong Kong-based video card manufacturer Palit is excited about its Revolution 700 Deluxe video card -- so much so that we're a little frightened by the force of its enthusiasm. The ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 GPU is no slouch to begin with, but this iteration has cores overclocked to 750MHz and 2GB of GDDR5 memory at a face-melting 3.8GHz. As imposing as clock speeds are, they likely can't measure up to the epic hype from Palit. "All other cards beware," the press release boldly cries, "there is a new king in town and it only comes from Palit!" Tap the read link for the whole thing -- best enjoyed while listening to the Mortal Kombat theme song.
Hardware check before WotLK
All right, so not only are the system requirements out for Wrath, but new MacBooks came out yesterday as well, and we're just now heading into the holiday season. So now might be a great time to do a hardware check on your computer, and see how it stacks up to how you'll be playing WoW.So here's a quick look at who will be able to run what where in the future. Keep in mind that Blizzard is extremely kind on system requirements -- they design their games to run on almost anything (which is one reason why they have so many fans), so odds are pretty good that if you run WoW well now, you'll run it well after Wrath (though you may also have to tweak the ingame video settings a bit, and you may not get the benefit of the cool graphical touches they're adding in). But if you do want to upgrade the way you see the game, there are a few things you can do, from upgrading a few parts to getting a whole new computer.
IOGEAR intros USB 2.0 external DVI video card
Just in case IOGEAR's USB 2.0 External VGA Video Card (pictured) wasn't swank enough for your DVI-equipped display, the firm is introducing a variant just for you. Designed to give users the ability to spread those 80 column spreadsheets over two monitors without cracking open the case, the USB 2.0 External DVI Video Card enables the use of a multi-monitor setup for folks with leased / locked machines and those absolutely terrified of seeing PCB in the flesh. Of course, the $149.99 unit is only designed to operate with Windows XP / Vista, but chances are your corporate box isn't running anything else, anyway.
NVIDIA's GeForce 9600 GT card is officially the new budget hotness
It's been a long time coming, but it looks like the GPU industry finally figured out the fact that most consumers don't want to blow a couple grand on an SLI setup, they just want to play Crysis debt-free. The new GeForce 9600 GT from NVIDIA is an answer to those prayers, offering solid performance ratings nearly in line with last-gen's 8800 GT, at a completely lovable $199-and-under pricepoint. For now the top of the performance charts is still the 8800 Ultra -- as NVIDIA will readily admit -- but the 9600 GT is just the first of NVIDIA's GeForce 9 series, and while it's sure to be followed by bigger, badder and more expensive versions, it's refreshing to see the 9600 hitting the market first. Read - GeForce 9600 GT Read - PC Per GeForce 9600 GT review Read - HotHardware GeForce 9600 GT review
Gaming graphics cards drive advances in medical imaging
We all know that gamers can actively help medical research through efforts like the PS3's Folding@Home project. Now comes word from UK's The Engineer magazine that gamers and their pumped up video cards are helping the cause of medical imaging without even trying.You see, speeding up the processing of magnetic resonance imaging is important to prevent the blurring effects of involuntary body movement. Networked supercomputers are fast enough to do it, but they're too expensive to be a wide scale solution. However, high-powered video cards, with their 128 built-in processors, provide the perfect, low-cost method for speeding things up. And why have those graphics cards so freaking cheap and powerful? "The reason for this is the games industry," said Kings College London Professor Tobias Schaeffter. "It is amazing how much the power of the cards increases annually by putting on more processors and more memory."So remember, the next time you plunk down hundreds of dollars for that new super-duper graphics card, you're not just helping your gaming experience -- in some small way, you're helping medical research.
Reminder: Give your video card drivers a little love
Theflamecrow on WoW LJ provides us with our quarterly reminder: it's probably time to update your video card's drivers, if you haven't done it in a while.If you're on a Mac, you don't need to worry about this (Software Update's got you covered, and the latest graphics update already helped your framerate). For PCs, Nvidia card drivers can get the latest version here, and ATI card owners can grab the latest files here. If you're not sure what kind of video card you've got installed, you can just follow along with this simple guide from the last big video card reminder, or one of the many other driver update guides available.I should warn you: 99% of the time, updating your video card drivers will fix all kinds of problems-- it'll usually help your framerate, if it needs it, and it will often clear out problems with artifacts and other graphics glitches. But doing any system activity like updating drivers has the potential to harm your system, so always follow all instructions (like turning off all other programs and restarting the PC when asked) and, if possible, have a backup ready when you update. I've never had a system problem while updating graphics drivers, but if you're not careful, it could happen.
HD decoding CPU usage shootout: ATI vs nVidia
While around here you're more likely to see a flame war erupt about Blu-ray versus HD DVD, on many computer gaming websites the war is over ATI and nVidia, with the two major video card manufacturers constantly leapfrogging each other in an attempt to benchmark the highest scores on games like Unreal Tournament and Doom. Ars Technica has a head-to-head comparison on how well the their latest offerings perform decoding high-definition content, using an Xbox 360 HD DVD add-on drive and some prerecorded 1080p and 1080i content. While both camps did similarly well, ATI was better at playing back VC-1-encoded HD DVD content, and nVidia held a slight edge on 1080i recordings. The benefits to both allow even older video hardware to take a load off the CPU, meaning home theater PC builders can pair a cheaper CPU and video card for playing back HD on the cheap.
Massive giveaways: The two week anniversary
Ah, it seems like just yesterday that we were celebrating our two-week anniversary by giving away a 24" Samsung SyncMaster 245BW LCD monitor and an EVGI 8800 GeForce 320Mb PCI-E SLI-compatible video card. And while we're aware that everyone in the audience is eagerly awaiting news on the winners of our contests, I'm here to share the news! Commenter Dean is walking away with our fancy new video card and commenter Filipe is taking home that sweet 24" monitor. Both of them get the opportunity to enjoy their favorite games with a much better view. Congrats to both of them!For those of you wondering about our other contests, hang tight. We can't announce a list of winners until we've heard back from everyone for each contest -- so if you've entered a contest that winners haven't yet been announced for, be sure to check your mailbox and spam filters for notices from weblogsinc.com or massively.com
Massively's Massive Giveaways: Win a GeForce 8800 PCI-E video card! [Updated]
So here we are, two weeks in from our official launch of Massively. You've had a chance to peruse our news, views, guides, and more. On the back end, we've been putting our staff through their paces, and we're glad to say that they've come out with flying colors. But today what we want to focus on, dear readers, is you. Each and every person has a different gaming love, homes that span from the Amarr Empire in EVE to the soggy swamps of Zangarmarsh in World of Warcraft. All of these virtual worlds are important to us because they're important to you. As such, we're spending today thanking you for bringing us into your online lives, and letting us share in your worlds.For today's first giveaway, we are offering a monster video card for all your virtual world needs. That's right, one lucky person will walk away with an EVGI 8800 GeForce 320Mb PCI-E SLI-compatible video card. This card features a PCI Express x16 interface, 320 MB of RAM, and dual RAMDACs running at 400 MHz for faster refresh rates even at high resolutions. We haven't heard of a game out currently that this card doesn't scream through. And you could be the lucky winner if you're 18+, a U.S. resident, and otherwise acceptable under the official rules. Comments must be left by no later than 12:00 PM Midnight Eastern U.S. time on 11/19/07 to be eligible. You may enter once per day between now and then as well, so be sure to come back every day!While all you need to do to be entered is to leave a quick comment below, we'd greatly appreciate your thoughts on the games we've been covering. Do you like the level of coverage your favorite game is getting? Are we missing some games that you think are fantastic? If you'd let us know, we'd greatly appreciate it. Thanks! [EDIT] - We have decided to extend the contest unti 11:59 PM Eastern tonight (11/19) -- so get your comments in![EDIT, THE SECOND] - This contest is closed. We will be announcing a winner shortly. Thanks!
Download details for EVE Online's Trinity expansion
It's time to make sure you got room on your hard drive as CCP Gamesis planning on dumping incremental bits to help ease Trinity's digital distribution, which is being estimated to be over 1 gigabyte in size. Trinity is the next expansion in the EVE Online universe that will be free-to-download and features an ultra new shiny graphics engine and numerous updates to the cosmic battlefield in the form of combat advancements; New Tech II ships; hundreds of missions; and metric tons more. CCP developer, 2kay has posted a slew of details on how this distribution will work and the need for a separate client that utilizes the improved graphics engine to its full potential. It is important to note in order to use the new graphical content players will need a graphics card that supports Shader Model 3, a format newer graphic cards already do. To help determine if your card supports this technology CCP put together an application to help players check, available here. Another alternative is to check in the device manager under display adapters or if you already know your video card make and model, do an internet search to make sure it has SM3 capability, it only takes a few minutes so get off your butt and do it before it's too late. If your graphics card does not support this technology you will still be able to play via the classic client and the patcher will not force you to install the higher end client. The new graphics look absolutely breath-taking, sadly I'm running antiquated video technology so I'll be upgrading shortly after Trinity launches. Crazy Kinuk is a screen capping maniac and has over a thousand Eve screenshots available for your viewing pleasure on his blog -- be sure check out his flickr for some comparisons of old and new ship graphics as pictured. I drooled.
New iMac Video card stealth upgrade: mobility Radeon HD 2600 XT?
I'm going to mark this one rumor for right now, but there's an interesting thread going on over at MacRumors Forums that suggests that the new iMacs may have a stealth upgrade. When they were announced a lot of folks were disappointed with the included Radeon HD 2600 Pro graphics card, however, some people have discovered that (at least running Windows in Boot Camp) their machines appear to be reporting that the GPU is actually an underclocked mobility Radeon HD 2600 XT, which is a more powerful chip. This would not be the first time that Windows has revealed hardware that Apple wanted hidden, as several machines were discovered to have draft 802.11n wireless networking chipsets in that way before they were later activated by Apple. Many are expressing hope that some future update or some ATI specific tool might unlock the hidden power of the GPU, but at this point it seems to be wishful thinking.Thanks Marin!
NVIDIA GeForce 8600 and 8500 launch deets outed
Still haven't scraped together enough change to get yourself a fancy new 8800? Well just wait 10 more days and you can get (a little bit of) that hip-cool technology for peanuts. The GeForce 8600 GTS, 8600 GT and 8500 GT are all due on April 17th, hitting at the $199-$229, $149-$159 and $89-$129 price points, respectively. Specs scale nicely, with 256MB of GDDR3, a 675MHz core clock and a 1000MHz memory clock at the top end, on down to the 128 to 256MB DDR2 or GDDR3, 450MHz core clock and 700MHz memory clock at the bottom. Before too long, the even more basic 8400 GS and 8300 GS will round out the set, but hopefully you won't have to stoop that low to get your DirectX 10 on.
More yummy details surface on ATI's R600 offerings
Sure, most roadmaps don't present anything to get immediately excited about, but considering the journey the R600 has taken to get to this point, the newest details concerning its future are indeed enthralling. While we've seen ATI's beast, witnessed its mighty power (and kilowatt sucking abilities), and even heard about a recent snag, it looks like things could be worked out fairly soon. According to TweakTown, the flagship edition -- dubbed the X2900XTX and codenamed Dragons Head 2 -- will sport a 9.5-inch configuration, 1GB of GDDR4 memory, dual DVI, video in / out, and require a baffling 240-watts of energy delivered through dual onboard power connectors. The X2900XT (Cats Eye) will share most of the same design characteristics as the aforementioned card, but will tout GDDR3 RAM and a lower clock speed to boot. As seen in the read link, ATI is apparently looking at releasing several more iterations with varying clock speeds and other luxuries, and while we can't confirm the claims just yet, the cards could be hitting shelves anytime within the next several weeks depending on model.[Thanks, Juan D.]
