Hasta La Gadget!

Our Intel Arrandale / Clarkdale review bonanza was sprinkled with a few graphics benchmarks, but there was never a concerted effort to break down the specific upgrades on the 45nm GPU that comes as part of the new CPU package. That omission has now been corrected by Bit-tech, who’ve delved deep into the murky waters of embedded graphics and report that Intel’s focus appears to have been firmly on video playback. Noting full bitstreaming, (our HD editors inform us that’s a big deal), Blu-ray with picture-in-picture, and HDMI 1.3a support, the lads commended the “very smooth” 1080p playback of h.264-encoded video. While their conclusion about gaming was less glowing — finding that Intel’s latest gen only keeps up with older hardware — they couldn’t help but recommend the new processors on account of their feature-rich video playback and energy efficiency. More benchmarks at the source link.

Intel GMA HD graphics review deems them excellent for video, mediocre for gaming originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 25 Jan 2010 07:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Many a mind might’ve strayed from all the CES crazy-talk about future tech and wondered as to what exactly is going on in the war against bad graphics on otherwise totally sweet laptops. The answer from NVIDIA is, disappointingly, not much. The green giant of GPUs quietly snuck out its 300M mobile GPUs over the turn of the year, and there was good reason for the lack of fuss — the top tier GeForce GTS 360M sports the same number of processing cores as its 260M predecessor, accompanied by the same 2GHz memory clock and identical 128-bit memory interface. But don’t despair yet, sailor! There’s the stark omission of any GeForce GTX models among the new 300Ms, which should fuel hopes that this gap in what NVIDIA calls the enthusiast market will be filled by Fermi-shaped chips come March of this year.

NVIDIA outs 300M mobile graphics series, causes little excitement originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 13 Jan 2010 06:02:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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In a Tuesday blog post, Nvidia teased a power-management technology that the company will be adding to its mobile graphics chipsets later in the first quarter.

Dubbed “Optimus,” the technology appears to preserve the performance of discrete graphics while power-managing the chipset for longer battery life.

“As we approach CES we wanted to tell you about an upcoming mobile technology that we will be introducing in Q1,” Rene Haas of Nvidia posted to the company’s blog. “It is called NVIDIA Optimus technology. NVIDIA Optimus technology works on notebook platforms with NVIDIA GPUs. It is unique to NVIDIA. It is seamless and transparent to the user. Its purpose is to optimize the mobile experience by letting the user get the performance of discrete graphics from a notebook while still delivering great battery life. Look for more details next month.”

Intel Core i3, mobile Core i5 processors coming January 7 originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 17 Dec 2009 16:10:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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ATI just announced its latest greatest polygon cruncher on the planet: the previously leaked Radeon HD 5970. The new card card is also one of the first to support Microsoft DirectX 11 and Eyefinity multi-display (driving up to three displays at once for a 7680×1600 maximum resolution) with ripe potential for overclocking thanks to the card’s Overdrive technology. Instead of relying upon a single GPU like the already scorching Radeon HD 5870, the 5970 brings a pair of Cypress GPUs linked on a single board by a PCI Express bridge for nearly 5 TeraFLOPS of computer power, or a mind boggling 10 TeraFLOPS when setup in CrossFireX. Naturally, the card’s already been put to the test by all the usual benchmarking nerds who praise the card as the undisputed performance leader regardless of game or application. It even manages to keep power consumption in check until you start rolling on the voltage to ramp those clock speeds. As you’d expect then, ATI isn’t going to offer any breaks on pricing so you can expect to pay the full $599 suggested retail price when these cards hit shelves today for retail or as part of your new gaming rig bundle.

Read – Press Release
Read – Anandtech
Read – HotHardware
Read – PC Perspective
Read – HardOCP
Read – Hexus
Read – MaximumPC
Read – TweakTown

Filed under: Desktops, Gaming

ATI Radeon HD 5970: world’s fastest graphics card confirmed originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 18 Nov 2009 01:49:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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