Hasta La Gadget!

This week during Intel’s Developers Forum, Lucid showed off a lovely Thunderbolt External Graphics solution that’ll have you Ultrabook owners flipping over the possibilities. Here with this non-finalized piece of hardware, you’ll be plugging in graphics power from Lucid with very little effort, bringing visual power from Lucid’s external hardware that was never before possible in such a tiny package as your current-generation Ultrabook. What Lucid showed off here is your ability – in the near future – to turn your Ultrabook into a real hardcore gaming machine.

When showed to Laptop Mag, it would found that a combination of a prototype Thunderbolt graphics card from Lucid produced amicable results. With a combination of Intel’s integrated Intel HD Graphics 4000 chip on a standard Ivy Bridge motherboard, they showed 3DMark06 benchmark bringing up 28 frames-per-second – that’s without this new solution. With the Lucid external graphic card plugged in through the test system’s Thunderbolt port, great things happened.

With the Thunderbolt-connected Lucid-made system, here a AMD Radeon 6700 chip, 3DMark06 brought up a much more fabulous 89 fps. This system works extremely simply, with a plug in to the system resulting in a moment of black screen then the system appearing under Windows Device Manager under Display adapters. If you’re in the mood to disconnect the system again, you’ll simply be force-quit out of whatever application your in and the original Windows desktop will be up and ready to continue to rock without it.

This external video card solution makes it so the future of laptop-based gaming (or desktop-based gaming, for that matter) will bring upgrades with as simple as a cord plug. No more screwdriver action for you if you don’t want! Prices and release dates have not yet been revealed – stay tuned for more Lucid action!

[via Laptop Mag]

Lucid Thunderbolt External GPU demoed for undeniable Ultrabook gaming boost is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Linux godfather Linus Torvalds may have a frosty relationship with NVIDIA, but that hasn’t stopped the company from improving its hardware’s support for the open-source operating system. In fact, the chipset-maker is working on the OS’ compatibility with its Optimus graphics switching tech, which would enable laptops to conserve power by swapping between discrete and integrated graphics on the fly. In an email sent to a developer listserv, NVIDIA software engineer Aaron Plattner revealed that he’s created a working proof of concept with a driver. There’s no word on when the Tux-loving masses may see Optimus support, but we imagine that day can’t come soon enough for those who want better battery life while gaming on their mobile machines.

Filed under: Laptops, Software

NVIDIA working on Linux support for Optimus automatic graphics switching originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 05 Sep 2012 06:29:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It’s time for some fabulous 28nm Kepler action from NVIDIA with the GeForce GTX 660 Ti – bringing the fabulous next-generation graphics of Kepler GPU architecture in at a surprisingly affordable price. With the $299 Nvidia GeForce GTX 660 Ti you’ll be rolling out with a base clock speed of 915MHz and no less than two dual-link DVI outs, HDMI, and a DisplayPort 1.2 to boot. Along with a fabulous 1,344 CUDA cores in the mix, you’re getting essentially the same package as the GTX 670 with a major chop-out on the cash cost.

With the GTX 660Ti you’ve got what NVIDIA tells us will be a lovely 150W TDP or down to 134W under “typical use”. NVIDIA also notes that here in the hardware’s 2GB video buffer you’ve got 192-bit GDDR5 RAM making it all hum nicely too – this is just below the GTX 670′s configuration which is 256-bit GDDR5. Configurations will vary between brand releases, of course, but most will be popping up with a bit of a bonus – Borderlands 2!

Have a peek at MAINGEAR’s release and see a couple of custom built limited-edition PCs made with the 660 Ti with Borderlands 2 included as well. You’ll find that NVIDIA is making an effort to come up directly against the AMD Radeon HD 7870, also on the market now, with both of them coming in at $299 standard.

NVIDIA has made claims that the GeForce GTX 660 Ti has had anywhere in between 10 and 30 percent performance gain over the AMD Radeon HD 7870, and has taken on the slightly more expensive $350 AMD Radeon HD 7950 as well. NVIDIA let it be known that in tests vs the 7950, their GTX 660 Ti came up with higher average frame rates, up to 20 percent in some cases, when testing games such as Max Payne 3.

And of course, as shown above, each new generation of NVIDIA’s GPU line keeps getting better and better! Stay tuned for more GTX 660 Ti action throughout the day, and stick around as we test our own build on a custom-built MAINGEAR review unit soon as well. The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 Ti will begin shipping today from all your favorite outlets, too, so get pumped!

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 Ti brings Kepler power with a cut on cost is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

It’s taken NVIDIA a mighty long time to squeeze its Kepler GPU into something more affordable than the GTX 670, but it’s finally happened — the mid-range GTX 660 Ti is out and available to purchase for $299 on boards from EVGA, Gigabyte, ASUS and the usual suspects. Some buyers may complain that’s $50 more than the 560 Ti, while others will no doubt be reeling off their CVV codes already. For its part, NVIDIA claims the 660 Ti is the “best card per watt ever made” and that it beats even AMD’s higher-priced Radeon HD 7950 at 1920 x 1080. Check out the slide deck below for official stats, as well as for examples of what the card can do with its support for DirectX 11 tessellation, PhysX (particularly on Borderlands 2, which you may well find bundled free) and NVIDIA’s TXAA anti-aliasing.

We’ll wait for independent benchmarks in our review round-up before making any judgment, but in the meantime it’s fair to say that this 150-watt card comes fully featured. For a start, it has just as many 28nm CUDA cores as the GTX 670, the same base and GPU Boost clock speeds, the same 2GB of GDDR5 and indeed the same connectivity. The only sacrifice is memory bandwidth: all that computational performance is limited by a 192-bit memory bus, compared to the 256-bit width of the 670. Judging from those specs, we’d expect it to be almost 670-like in performance, and that’s going to be pretty impressive.

Continue reading NVIDIA announces $299 GeForce GTX 660 Ti, lets Kepler walk among the people

Filed under: Desktops, Gaming

NVIDIA announces $299 GeForce GTX 660 Ti, lets Kepler walk among the people originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 16 Aug 2012 09:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Just as you’ve cozied up with “Tahiti” and “Cape Verde,” AMD has returned to grow its “Southern Islands” family of graphics cards with four fresh FirePros, offering up to four teraflops of graphics computing power. That spec can be found in the company’s new W9000, which is capable of four TFLOPs single precision and one TFLOP double precision with a price tag just shy of $4,000. That behemoth of a card offers 6GB of GDDR5 RAM and requires 274 watts of power. More humble members of the fam include the W8000, which has the same form-factor as the higher-end W9000, but eases back on the specs, consuming 189 watts of power and carrying a $1,599 price tag.

We had a chance to take a closer look at both cards at SIGGRAPH, and while they packed a significant amount of heft, you’ll likely never take a second look once they’re buried away in your tower rig. Fans of smaller housings (and price tags) may take notice of the W7000 and W5000, which are both considerably more compact and require less power to boot, with pricing set at $899 and $599, respectively. Those cards were also on hand for our demo, and can be seen along with the top two configs in our gallery below. You can also sneak a closer peek in the hands-on video after the break, and glance at the full specs over at our news post from earlier today.

Continue reading AMD launches its next-gen FirePro graphics card lineup, we go hands-on at SIGGRAPH (video)

Filed under: Desktops, Gaming, Peripherals

AMD launches its next-gen FirePro graphics card lineup, we go hands-on at SIGGRAPH (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 07 Aug 2012 15:46:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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