Hasta La Gadget!

NVIDIA has just announced that the GTX 480M, the mobile re-spin of its extravagantly overpowered Fermi desktop parts, will be arriving in the middle of next month. Touted as the world’s fastest mobile graphics processor, this chip will bring 352 CUDA cores and a 256-bit memory interface to up to 2GB of GDDR5 RAM. These are clear and convincing advances over the incumbent Green Team leader, the 360M, but things start to look a little worrying when we check the 480M’s clock speeds. The processor speed is nearly halved from the desktop GTX 480, at 850MHz, the memory does only 1,200MHz, and the graphics run at 425MHz — we didn’t know anything worthwhile even operated below 500MHz these days. Either way, you’re getting a computing powerhouse, with the 480M’s 897 gigaflops comfortably dwarfing its predecessor’s 413 and promising almighty tessellation performance. What it all means with regard to keeping your frame rates up while traversing the Terminus Systems, we can’t yet say. We’ll let the benchmarking gurus figure it out — go past the break for the full press release and spec sheet.

Continue reading NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480M: ‘world’s fastest’ mobile GPU now official, landing in June

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480M: ‘world’s fastest’ mobile GPU now official, landing in June originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 25 May 2010 09:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  NVIDIA  | Email this | Comments

Hey, you there, wanna check out some unreleased new hardware from NVIDIA? Donanimhaber, the same site that brought us early (and accurate) specs of the GTX 470 and 480, is back with the above shot of an ASUS-built GTX 465 that is intended to entice the more mainstream crowd into the Fermi party. Essentially a GF100 with its wingtips trimmed, this’ll offer the same 607MHz graphics and 1,215MHz processor clock speeds of the 470, but comes with a narrower 256-bit memory interface, a tamer 3.2GHz effective memory clock, 352 rather than 448 CUDA cores, and — happily — lower power requirements. This word is also corroborated by Bit-tech, whose scribes expect a launch at the start of Computex. The Turkish site also has news of a GTX 460, which they say will show up in the middle of July with 768MB of GDDR5, while also being “cheaper and slower” than the 465. Hit the Hexus link below for some early benchmarks of the latter card.

NVIDIA GTX 465 detailed ahead of June 1 launch, GTX 460 also rumored originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 20 May 2010 10:55:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink Hexus  |  Donanimhaber (465), (460), Bit-tech.net  | Email this | Comments

We had an inkling NVIDIA wouldn’t keep the Fermi goodness just to the desktop and here’s our first pseudo-official confirmation. Rushing in ahead of any announcements, Eurocom has started listing a GeForce GTX 480M part, replete with 2GB of GDDR5 memory and a $345 markup relative to ATI’s Mobility Radeon HD 5870. It’s not clear whether the 100W number refers to the TDP or power requirements of NVIDIA’s new GPU, but it’s safe to expect both to be pretty high. The MXM 3.0b interface provides a 256-bit linkup between the GPU and CPU, lending plenty of bandwidth, but it also demands plenty of PCB real estate. As a result, Eurocom is offering the GTX 480M on its 17-inch Cheetah and Panther and 18.4-inch Leopard desktop replacements, but not on its 15.6-inch Cougar. Man, no love for the Cougars. According to the listing, we’re only a month or so away from release.

[Thanks, Jacob]

NVIDIA GTX 480M will bring Fermi to laptops this June, crazy power requirements and all originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 02 May 2010 06:39:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  Eurocom  | Email this | Comments

Good news, mobile gamers — NVIDIA‘s looking out for you and yours, and if you’re tired of lobbying to Congress about the inequities between driver releases for desktop GPUs and driver releases for mobile GPUs, you can finally move on to some other just cause. NVIDIA’s Verde driver program has been a relative success over the years, but it’s about to become a lot more gnarly when the company outs its 256 Series drivers in a few months. At that time, NVIDIA plans to “completely unify its GPU drivers, so mobile and desktop users will be able to get the latest releases simultaneously.” Users won’t find the desktop and laptop drivers in the same package, but we’re sure each one will be clearly marked on the download page. It’s worth noting, however, that these unified releases will only work with laptops featuring discrete GPUs, hybrid solutions utilizing NVIDIA-branded IGPs and Optimus-enabled machines; rigs with multi-vendor solutions (like the Alienware M11x, which uses an integrated set from Intel) won’t be allowed to join the party.

In related news, the upcoming release of the 197.16 driver for laptops will bring along support for external displays with 3D Vision, enabling 3D Vision-ready laptops to pipe 3D content to 3D Vision-ready LCDs with ease. Good news all around, but you’ll have to give those links below a visit if you’re hungry for more.

NVIDIA Verde to sync up desktop and laptop GPU driver releases, generate smiles galore originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 26 Apr 2010 15:42:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  Hot Hardware  | Email this | Comments

We’ve been fortunate enough to spend a bit of time with an Eyefinity setup before, but up until now, it’s been somewhat of a hassle to get a fully functional six-screen setup into a consumer’s home. Today, AMD is taking the legwork out of the equation with the introduction of the Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity 6 Edition, a standalone GPU with 2GB of GDDR5 memory and innate support for pushing a half-dozen panels at once. Outside of that, it’s essentially the same card that we saw last September, and based on the cadre of reviews that we rounded up, the doubled memory bank doesn’t do much to boost frame rates. What it does do, however, is enable six-screen gaming. Unfortunately (though understandably), this type of gaming scenario is only meant for a select segment of users, and many critics found the novelty wearing off exceptionally quick. In fact, it wasn’t long before NeoSeeker became fed up with the bezels ruining the experience, and just about everyone agreed that you needed to sit a good half-mile away to really enjoy it. Either way, we’d encourage you to hit up Hot Hardware‘s collection of videos before biting the bullet, buying up an extra five LCDs and then regretting it for the rest of your Earthly life.

Read – Hot Hardware
Read – AnandTech
Read – NeoSeeker
Read – Rage3D
Read – PC Perspective
Read – TweakTown
Read – FiringSquad
Read – Tom’s Hardware
Read – ExtremeTech
Read – Hexus

ATI Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity 6 Edition review roundup: novel, but not for everyone originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 31 Mar 2010 10:36:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  AMD  | Email this | Comments