Hasta La Gadget!

Today users of PCs working with NVIDIA GeForce graphics processors will be finding an update available to them, this software download continuing a legacy of similar pushes by the company to keep up-to-date with the latest top-tier gaming titles on the market. The NVIDIA GeForce 320.00 beta drivers appearing on machines this week are being pushed both automatically – through users’ notification pop-up system in Windows – and through NVIDIA’s GeForce Experience application. The NVIDIA GeForce Experience is another effort by the company to connect their graphics development team to the end user in as simple a form as possible.

With the update being offered this week, NVIDIA has delivered new support for a series of games most recent to the market. Support of what NVIDIA says is “up to 20% faster performance” is included for games like Dead Island: Riptide, Neverwinter, and the Star Trek title associated with the film Star Trek Into Darkness. Dead Island: Riptide is also included in the GeForce Experience instant optimization collection.

NVIDIA continues to make pushes in the gaming market both in the desktop and mobile gaming arenas. Earlier this year at CES, NVIDIA announced several cross-over projects that would have traditionally mobile platforms such as Android working with high-powered gaming PC graphics processing over wireless local networks. Have a peek at our coverage of NVIDIA’s Project Shield to see NVIDIA’s mobile gaming device hero that’ll be released later this year.

Have a peek at other recent updates to NVIDIA’s gaming environment and see for yourself how they’re aiming to keep their name in gamers minds through 2013. Let us know if you use NVIDIA’s GeForce GPUs and how you find the upgrade process as well, and if you’re a gamer who uses something other than a GeForce GPU, too!

NVIDIA GeForce driver update continues expanding support for newest games is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

This week the man known as Raja Koduri has returned to a position with GPU company AMD from a 4-year appointment with Apple. So this former AMD CTO left to work with Apple four years ago, has worked there ever since (with the likes of some of the top minds on the GPU industry), and is now back to work with AMD. And this isn’t the only former AMD employee to jump back aboard!

It’s not often that we see a major company like Apple losing employees in the first place, much less to a company where they’d hired them from in the first place. But there it is: Raja Koduri has re-joined AMD as Corporate Vice President of Visual Computing. This title also lets us know that AMD is entering a new era: this is the first time they’ve combined GPU hardware and software under a single title.

Last year AMD also re-hired (read: snatched back) a former employee of theirs from Apple in CPU man Jim Keller. If you have a peek back at SlashGear’s original report on Jim Keller, you’ll see that such a switch is always a news bit in and of itself. Both Keller and Koduri working for AMD once again doesn’t necessarily spell anything really negative for Apple, but for AMD things are certainly looking up.

Speaking with Anand Lal Shimpi this week on his return, Koduri made it clear that he sees AMD as having challenges in the near future, but not challenges that will be insurmountable. It’s likely that some real System-on-chip results will be coming out of this new appointment.

Have a peek at our AMD tag portal to see how AMD is rolling in to 2013 with some real power in both the GPU and CPU universes, and expect some strong moves from the company in the next few years as well!

Ex-AMD CTO Raja Koduri returns from 4-year Apple job is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

With the release of the NVIDIA GeForce GTX Titan GPU this year, we knew NVIDIA wasn’t going to pull any punches when it came to offering the highest-powered hardware to the public at any cost. Here with the reveal of the GeForce 700M family, the battle continues with notebook warriors galore. You’ll be seeing the NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M, 745M, 740M, 735M, and 720M coming your way soon – get pumped up about laptop graphics monstrousness!

Inside each of these bits of architecture you’ve got the graphics power to take your notebook to the next level. With the GeForce GT 750M, 745M, and 740M, NVIDIA will be aiming for a higher performance segment – not your everyday laptop machine, that is. The two smaller bits, the GeForce GT 735M, and 720M, will be heading to high-powered gaming notebooks this year.

Each of these GPUs is based on Kepler and works with NVIDIA Optimus technology so if you’re all about both next-generation power and long life in batteries, you’ll be set. You’ll have GPU Boost 2.0 technology and all the most fabulous NVIDIA innovations to roll with as well. Have a peek at the GeForce Experience to see what you’ll be working with in the near future on a GeForce-packing notebook near you.

“Every leading notebook manufacturer will be introducing notebooks with GPU Boost 2.0 technology, including Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, MSI, Samsung, Sony and Toshiba.” – NVIDIA

Also meanwhile have a peek at our NVIDIA GeForce tag portal and our Tegra hub to see how the desktop and mobile gaming universes will be converging more and more as the year goes on. We’ll be rolling out with high powered hand-held adventures sooner than you think!

[via NVIDIA]

NVIDIA GeForce 700M brings on five notebook-bound beasts is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Modern day hardware has one advantage over the hardware of yore – a simple firmware update (all right, so coming up with a tweaked firmware is not that simple in essence, but you know what I am talking about here, don’t you?) is all that is required to offer a boost in overall performance, compared to having to purchase a totally new piece of hardware in the past. Well, Intel’s integrated HD 4000 GPU has been used in numerous devices in the past, so it is nice to hear that the silicone giant has announced a totally new graphics driver for the existing chipset, targeting machines that run on Ivy Bridge processors.

According to Intel, this new firmware update ought to see improvement in graphics performance by up to 10%, in addition to lowering the overall power consumption, which is always a good thing whenever you deal with mobile devices. The upcoming Intel HD 4000 graphics driver will be version 15.3.1, and it is tipped for an early April release, which frankly, is not too far off away.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Skype For Windows 8 Updated To Version 1.6, IBM Roadrunner Hits The End Of The Road,

It looks like AMD is wanting to tackle the cloud gaming industry and take on the likes of OnLive. The company announced its new Sky series graphics at GDC 2013 this week, which is a new series of graphics chips being added on to the company’s current Radeon line. The Sky series was built specifically with cloud gaming in mind.

The new Sky cards are built on AMD’s Graphics Core Next architecture and use RapidFire technology in order to deliver the best cloud gaming experience possible. The series includes three enterprise-level graphics cards, with the top-tier model being the Sky 900, which packs in 3,584 stream processors, 6GB of GDDR5 memory, and a memory bandwidth of 480GB per second.

The plan with these cards is to deliver cloud gaming to a number of devices, including PCs (obviously), smartphones, tablets, and even Smart TVs. The company said that they’re “working closely” with a handful of cloud gaming companies to build the best cloud-focused graphics cards out there. AMD announced partnerships with Otoy, Ubitus, G-Cluster, and CiiNow.

AMD’s new cloud gaming initiative comes a couple of months after NVIDIA announced its GRID cloud gaming system at CES 2013, which will allow gamers to stream games over the interwebs to their computer and other mobile devices, including the new Project SHIELD from NVIDIA, which can play graphic-intensive games on a small handheld. AMD’s plans for Sky are a bit scarce at this point, but we should be hearing more about it soon.

AMD announces Sky graphics for cloud gaming capabilities is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.