Hasta La Gadget!

If you’re the fidgety type that’s also in the market for a new GPU, AMD’s ready to tempt you into springing for a Radeon HD 7000 series card with the promise of free gaming swag. The imaginatively named “Never Settle: Reloaded” bundle reuses several titles from last year’s promotion — Farcry 3, Sleeping Dogs and Hitman: Absolution — and adds a few more it hopes will grab your attention: BioShock Infinite, Crysis 3, DmC Devil May Cry and Tomb Raider. AMD’s 7770 GHz Edition GPU no longer qualifies, but purchase a 7800 or 7900 series card and you’ll be given at least a couple of games to enjoy on your new hardware. Exactly what software you’ll receive varies on how much dough you’re waving around and what region you’re shopping in, so head to the source link for a full rundown of the options. A single 7990 or a two-pack of 7900 series cards will get you the most games, but if you don’t quite have the bread, ask Lara for a loan — she might be willing to share some of her perilous adventure fund and help you out.

Filed under: Desktops, Gaming, Peripherals, Software, AMD

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If you’re building or upgrading a budget gaming rig, it’ll be hard to ignore the GeForce GTX 650 and 660. Whether or not NVIDIA’s new chipsets are worth the glance is another matter, and early reviews suggest that a sale depends on just which market you’re in. The GTX 660, by far the darling of the review crowd, competes solidly against the Radeon HD 7850 by outrunning AMD’s hardware in most situations while undercutting on the official price. Only a few have taken a look at the lower-end GTX 650, but it’s not as much of a clear-cut purchasing decision — the entry-level video often slots in between the performance of the Radeon HD 7750 and 7770 without the price edge of its bigger brother. Either card is much better value for the money than the GT 640, however, and looks to be a meaningful upgrade if you’re trading up from equivalent prior-generation gear.

Read – AnandTech (GTX 660)
Read – Benchmark Reviews (GTX 660)
Read – Bit-Tech (GTX 660)
Read – Guru 3D (GTX 650)
Read – HardOCP (GTX 660)
Read – Hot Hardware (GTX 660)
Read – PC Mag (GTX 660)
Read – PC Perspective (GTX 660)
Read – Tom’s Hardware (GTX 650 and 660)

Filed under: Desktops, Gaming, Peripherals

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 and 660 review roundup: hitting the sweet spot, sometimes originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 14 Sep 2012 14:11:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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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 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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