Acer today announced the launch of the new 13.3" Aspire S3 Ultrabook at Computex Taipei. The S3 has inherited some of the industry-leading design and innovations of the Aspire S7, making it an impressively stylish and productive PC. As on the celebrated Aspire S7, the S3's patented dual-torque hinge design allows users to easily open the lid up to 180° for sharing content, while keeping the display wobble-free for an outstanding touch experience.

With Acer TwinAir cooling technology, the S3 is always cool to the touch without sacrificing performance. The light-sensing keyboard auto adjusts its brightness to ambient light for better visual comfort in dim settings. In addition, evoking the family design and visual purity of the S7's gorilla glass cover, the new S3 cover is made from aluminum and sprayed Sparkling White with a mirror-polish finish; the operation area is made from anodized aluminum throughout. Just 17.8 mm thin and weighing only 1.67 kg, this Ultrabook is slim and easy to carry anywhere.

NVIDIA backed up its grand GeForce GTX 780 launch with GeForce 320.18 WHQL drivers, supporting all its modern GPUs. It's also being recommended as a 'day-of-launch' WHQL driver for the GTX 780. The driver introduces game-specific performance improvements for Tomb Raider (by up to 20%), DiRT Showdown (up to 20%), Metro: Last Light (up to 10%), Assassin's Creed III (up to 8%), Far Cry 3 (up to 6%), Bioshock: Infinite (up to 5%). The driver also addresses game-specific performance issues with Metro: Last Light, Dead Island: Riptide, D&D: Neverwinter, and Star Trek: The Videogame.

SLI profiles are added or improved for a number of titles, including Call of Juarez: Gunslinger, Dead Island: Riptide, Dungeons & Dragons: Neverwinter, Euro Truck Simulator 2, Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon, GRID 2, Remember Me, Natural Selection 2, Resident Evil 6, and TrackMania² Canyon.DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce 320.18 WHQL for Windows 8/7/Vista 64-bit, Windows 8/7/Vista 32-bit, Windows XP 32-bit, Windows XP 64-bit

ZOTAC International, a global innovator and manufacturer of graphics cards, mainboards, mini-PCs and accessories, today supercharges the TITAN with the ZOTAC GeForce GTX TITAN AMP! Edition, the world's fastest single GPU graphics card.

"Gamers have always depended on the ZOTAC GeForce AMP! Edition series for the best performance within a given series. With the ZOTAC GeForce GTX TITAN AMP! Edition, we're able to deliver the absolute best performance from a single GPU in this generation," says Carsten Berger, senior director, ZOTAC International.

AMD has been criticized by some tech publications over Radeon HD 7000 series posing higher frame-latency over NVIDIA GeForce chips, even in cases where AMD's chips offer higher frame-rates. "Frame latency" or "frame time" was purported as a metric of the same importance as frame-rates, in graphics card reviews. Various essentially identical methods were used to show that AMD Radeon GPUs yield higher frame latency (time taken for frames drawn by the GPU to make it to the display) than NVIDIA GeForce ones, even in cases where AMD's chips offer higher frame-rates. AMD has apparently made a significant breakthrough in improving frame latency.

In January, AMD made its first official response to early tests that showed Radeon GPUs to pose higher frame latency. In its defense, AMD stated that frame-latency issues are not a hardware design flaw, and can be ironed out by optimizing drivers to the redesigned memory controllers on GPUs based on its Graphics CoreNext architecture. Sources told us that AMD is ready with its first prototype drivers that fix frame latency issues. These drivers are pre-alpha, and are made available to select industry partners, with an adequate level of competence and expertise, since a week now. After AMD takes feedback from these partners, the company will begin rolling out the first beta drivers, followed by WHQL-signed ones.

According to the latest global graphics card market share seen by Taiwanese tech industry observer DigiTimes, Palit Microsystems and PC Partner have each surpassed ASUSTek. The two relegated ASUS to the position of third biggest graphics card vendor by volume. ASUS is a vendor-neutral graphics card vendor, selling both NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon graphics cards; while Palit beat it with a predominantly GeForce-based product stack. Although Palit Microsystems is vendor-neutral on paper, it virtually stopped making AMD Radeon-based products.

Palit Microsystems runs two major brands, Palit, and Gainward, which target different global markets, and are seldom found in the same market. PC Partner, on the other hand, runs Sapphire, which focuses on AMD Radeon products, and ZOTAC, focusing on NVIDIA GeForce. Both Palit Microsystems and PC Partners also contract-manufacture graphics cards for other companies. With the surge of Palit Microsystems and PC Partner, ASUSTek is pushed down to the third place in global market-share, followed by MSI and GIGABYTE.

ORIGIN PC announced today the availability of the highly anticipated Corsair 900D full tower chassis to their award-winning line of GENESIS desktops. The Corsair 900D is the perfect solution for hardware enthusiasts looking for a desktop chassis that offers an incredible amount of expansion options with plenty of room for future upgrades. With enough space for up to nine hard drive bays, dual power supplies and support for up to 4-WAY SLI liquid-cooled NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN graphics cards, the Corsair 900D Chassis is a welcomed addition to the ORIGIN GENESIS family.

NVIDIA today announced five new notebook GPUs which deliver a trifecta of technologies that seamlessly and automatically maximize a consumer's notebook performance and experience.
With no effort or input from the notebook user, the technologies work in the background to save battery life, enhance performance and enrich the visual experience -- providing the best notebook experience the GPU can deliver.

NVIDIA posted GeForce 314.22 driver-suite, just in time for Bioshock: Infinite. The WHQL-signed drivers offer performance increments as high as 41 percent in Bioshock: Infinite; and up to 60 percent in Tomb Raider (2013), up to 23 percent in Sniper Elite V2, and up to 13 percent in Sleeping Dogs. These results were produced using a GeForce GTX 680, and NVIDIA claims the gains "will be seen on other GPUs also, though to varying degrees." The results are in comparison to the previous GeForce 314.07 WHQL drivers.

GeForce 314.22 WHQL is also claimed to improve SLI performance (tested using GTX 680), for Sniper Elite V2 by up to 21 percent, up to 14 percent in Sleeping Dogs, up to 10 percent in StarCraft II, and up to 15 percent in Civilization V. SLI support is added/improved for Sniper Elite: Nazi Zombie Army, Dungeons and Dragons: Neverwinter, and BioShock Infinite.

DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce 314.22 WHQL for Windows 8/7/Vista 64-bit, Windows 8/7/Vista 32-bit, Windows XP, and Windows XP 64-bit

Late last week, NVIDIA rolled out GeForce 314.21 Beta software suite with the single intention of improving performance and stability (eliminating artefacts) on Tomb Raider (2013). When it was released, enthusiasts observed a performance gap between comparable NVIDIA and AMD GPUs on running the game, particularly with features such as TressFX enabled. The new driver works to close the gap. In addition, NVIDIA added some new SLI and 3D Vision profiles.

DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce 314.21 Beta

You may have read our report from earlier today, covering the main points that AMD was trying to make in its recent teleconference with the European press (which includes us). While in the call, we were a little jolted by the choices of words some of AMD's executives used to describe their company's consumer graphics outlook for 2013, how they believe they can hold out for almost the entire year with little or no major updates to their product stack, and more interestingly, a few above-the-belt jabs at NVIDIA and its upcoming GeForce GTX Titan product.

The crux of AMD's emergency meeting with the press was to bust some misconceptions spread in the press over the last couple of weeks, to tell them a Graham's Number of times that they still hold the fastest single GPU on the planet, which powers the fastest graphics card there is (ASUS ARES II). The most ironic part of AMD's emergency meeting with the press was the one in which they called GeForce Titan NVIDIA's emergency/knee-jerk reaction to AMD's getting cozy with game developers, and netting some of the biggest PC game launches of the season for its Never Settle Reloaded bundle.

AMD's product manager for desktop graphics products Devon Nekechuk, in an interview with Japanese publication 4Gamer.net, revealed that his firm won't be launching any new Radeon GPUs in 2013, and that the company would instead play out the year on its current Radeon HD 7000 series' performance, with price adjustments and possible performance increments through driver updates. In a slide released to 4Gamers.net, AMD pointed that its Radeon HD 7900 series (high-end), HD 7800 series (performance), and HD 7700 series (mainstream), will carry on the company's mantle "throughout 2013."

This announcement is indication that GPU makers have decided to slow things down from the streak of rapid new GPU launches that lasted from some time around 2007, running up to 2012, which can be heavily taxing in terms of R&D costs for either companies. We know for sure that NVIDIA is clearing its backlog of consumer GPU development by releasing the GeForce GTX "Titan" graphics card in a couple of weeks' time, and we know from older reports that NVIDIA could launch a "refreshed" GeForce Kepler lineup, that largely retains the GeForce Kepler silicon while topping up with subtle changes (clock speeds, software features that don't involve redesigning the silicon, etc.,) but AMD coming out in the open with this announcement could change everything. NVIDIA has the opportunity to save a few coins by sticking to its current lineup (plus the upcoming GTX "Titan,") and responding to competition from AMD by price-adjustments and timely driver optimizations of its own.

A store listing by Danish online retailer Proshop reveals a couple of things, one, that NVIDIA's next flagship graphics card will indeed be called "GeForce GTX Titan," and two, it could be out of reach of a vast majority of enthusiasts. The retailer is listing an ASUS-branded card for 5,820.80 Danish Krone (US $1,046), and that's before Europe's famous taxation kicks in. After, that goes up to 7,276 DKK ($1,307).

If one has to infer performance of the card from this price, given that NVIDIA won't botch up price-performance in relation to GTX 690, the GTX Titan should perform on-par, or outperform the GTX 690. Even if it's a tiny bit slower, NVIDIA could focus its marketing efforts on the card's 4-way and 3-way SLI capabilities, using which one could outperform GTX 690 QuadSLI setups.

For those interested in taking Crysis 3 Open Beta (multiplayer) for a spin, NVIDIA released the new GeForce 313.95 Beta drivers, which addresses known issues, and is features optimizations for the game. NVIDIA expects performance increments as high as 35 percent. The driver also packs performance enhancements for other AAA titles, such as SLI and single-GPU performance gains of up to 27 percent with Assassin's Creed III, up to 19 percent for Civilization V, up to 14 percent in Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, up to 14 percent in DiRT 3, up to 11 percent in Just Cause 2, and up to 10 percent each in Deus Ex: Human Revolution, F1 2012, and Far Cry 3.

DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce 313.95 Beta

NVIDIA's GeForce Experience game settings optimization tool opened up to beta testing by the public at large. The software is designed to make PC gaming as effortless as console gaming, when it comes to getting the best experience out of available hardware. The tool detects your GeForce hardware, installed games, and suggests the best settings for your games given your system specs, which can be applied with one click.

GeForce Experience went open-beta with the release of a new version of the software, v1.0.1, which expands its list of supported games to include Far Cry 3, Mechwarrior Online, and Hawken; improved game detection logic, support for more CPUs (Core 2 series), playable settings for the new 2560 x 1440 resolution, translations to more languages, and numerous bug fixes.DOWNLOAD: GeForce Experience 1.0.1 Beta

2013 started off on a rather dull note for the PC graphics industry. NVIDIA launched its game console platform "Project: Shield," while AMD rebranded its eons-old GPUs to Radeon HD 8000M series. Apparently it could all change in late-February, with the arrival of a new high-end single-GPU graphics card based on NVIDIA's GK110 silicon, the same big chip that goes into making the company's Tesla K20 compute accelerator.

NVIDIA may have drawn some flack for extending its "GTX" brand extension too far into the mainstream and entry-level segment, and wants its GK110-based card to stand out. It is reported that NVIDIA will carve out a new brand extension, the GeForce Titan. Incidentally, the current fastest supercomputer in the world bears that name (Cray Titan, located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory). The GK110 silicon physically packs 15 SMX units, totaling 2,880 CUDA cores. The chip features a 384-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface.

TechPowerUp released version 0.6.7 of GPU-Z, the popular graphics subsystem information, monitoring, and diagnostic utility. The new release brings some feature-additions, support for more graphics processors, and stability improvements. To begin with, we made room in the GPU-Z window to display TMU (texture memory unit) count. Support for a large number of recently-launched GPUs, including Radeon HD 7870 "Tahiti LE," mobile GeForce 600 series MX, and from Quadro family, were added.

TechPowerUp GPU-Z 0.6.7 also brings a few UI enhancements. To begin with, GPU-Z remembers window position from its previous session, cutting you time for positioning it right for screenshots. Next up, when minimized, its tray icon does more than just show you the app is running. Its tooltip (visible when hovered), displays some important sensor data. A new "-tab" command line parameter allows proverclockers to script-launch GPU-Z showing a specific tab. Among the bugs fixed are one related to a crash occurring on CrossFire setups (a Catalyst-related bug), another crash occurring on NVIDIA setups when updating sensor data (GeForce driver-related bug), temperature reading on AMD "Llano" APUs is improved.DOWNLOAD: TechPowerUp GPU-Z 0.6.7, TechPowerUp GPU-Z 0.6.7 ASUS ROG Themed

The change-log follows.

NVIDIA released the GeForce 310.70 WHQL software suite, which isn't much more than a WHQL-signed version of the GeForce 310.70 beta drivers posted a couple of weeks ago. Available for 64-bit and 32-bit versions of Windows 8, Windows 7, Windows Vista, and Windows XP, the drivers, much like the 310.70 beta, are a cumulative of several R310 beta releases from over the past two months. They add significant performance increases over the previous 306.97 WHQL drivers.DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce 310.70 WHQL for Windows 8/7/Vista 64-bit, Windows 8/7/Vista 32-bit, Windows XP 64-bit, Windows XP 32-bit

Just as enthusiasts are beginning to test their hardware with Far Cry 3, and the GPU-toasting visual marvel that it is, NVIDIA released a driver specifically for it. Although intended for testers, the driver made its way onto the NVIDIA website. According to the change-log posted by them, the GeForce 310.64 beta enhances performance on Far Cry 3 by as much as 38 percent, in addition to all the performance enhancements and bug fixes being trickled down by previous R310 series drivers.

DOWNLOAD: GeForce 310.64 Beta

After launching its high-performance display driver for Linux that boosts GeForce graphics performance by 100%, NVIDIA released an open-source 2D driver code for its Tegra 2 and Tegra 3 SoCs, which is based on the experimental Direct Rendering Manager driver (DRM, not as in digital rights management). DRM was started as an independent project by Thierry Reding, but is now being worked on by NVIDIA, among others.

The open-source DRM driver code published by Terje Bergstrom today provide host1x and 2D on Tegra 2 and Tegra 3 SoCs, and was published by Terje Bergstrom. He writes "nvhost is the driver that controls host1x hardware. It supports host1x command channels, synchronization, run-time power management and memory management. It is sectioned into logical driver under drivers/video/tegra/host and physical driver under drivers/video/tegra/host/host1x. The physical driver is compiled with the hardware headers of the particular host1x version."

NVIDIA has today made available a new beta-tagged graphics driver, the GeForce 310.61 which is a small update from the GeForce 310.54 offering improved compatibility for PlanetSide 2 and Hitman: Absolution.

The GeForce 310.61 Beta supports GeForce 8, 9, 100, 200, 300, 400, 500 and 600 Series cards and is available for Windows 7, 8 and Vista, in both 32-bit and 64-bit flavors.

Gigabyte unveiled a variation of its 3 GB GeForce GTX 660 Ti OC graphics card. Bearing the model number N66TWF3-3GD, the card sticks to NVIDIA reference clock speeds of 915/980/6008 MHz (core/GPU Boost/memory). It features WindForce 3 triple-fan cooler featuring three 80 mm fans, ventilating a complex heatpipe-fed heatsink. Based on the 28 nm GK104 GPU, the GeForce GTX 660 Ti packs 1344 CUDA cores, and a 192-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface. On this card, twelve 2 Gbit GDDR5 chips are used, arranged on either sides of the PCB. Expect the card to cost around 300€.

Hot on the heels of last month's GeForce 310.33 Beta NVIDIA released the new GeForce 310.54 Beta driver suite, while promises performance improvements in a larger selection of games than its predecessor. As many as 21 titles received performance improvements compared to GeForce 306.97 WHQL, 15 compared to 310.33 beta, including those based on the latest cutting-edge engines, and those based on older ones. NVIDIA is promising 5~10% improvement in frame-rates. The improvement percentages specific to titles, compared to GeForce 306.97 WHQL are listed in the graph below.DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce 310.54 Beta

NVIDIA today announced the latest NVIDIA GeForce drivers -- R310 -- double the performance and dramatically reduce game loading times for those gaming on the Linux operating system.

The result of almost a year of development by NVIDIA, Valve and other game developers, the new GeForce R310 drivers are designed to give GeForce customers the best possible Linux-based PC gaming experience -- and showcase the enormous potential of the world's biggest open-source operating system.

NVIDIA's deep expertise in visual and mobile computing, and its extensive collaboration with Microsoft Corp., mean that consumers will enjoy premium experiences running on NVIDIA-powered systems for Windows 8 and Windows RT.

PCs with NVIDIA GeForce GPUs will deliver exceptional experiences for editing photos and video, playing games and browsing the web because Windows 8 and Internet Explorer 10 now take advantage of graphics hardware. And NVIDIA Tegra processors will power a new generation of amazingly thin and light Windows RT devices that run for days on a single charge.

NEC unveiled the first full-fledged convertible notebook running Windows 8 RT, driven by ARM machine-architecture. The LaVie Y with its 11.6-inch, 1366 x 768 pixel screen works as a tablet in your hands, or as a laptop. Its "lid" (the main component housing the touchscreen and central processing) spins almost 360° along the hinge of the base (with the keyboard, trackpad, and ports), letting you orient the device in a number of ways.

Under the hood is an NVIDIA Tegra 3 quad-core processor clocked at 1.30 GHz, with GeForce graphics; 2 GB of RAM, 64 GB SSD, and connectivity that includes USB 2.0, 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.0, 5-in-1 card reader, HDMI display output supporting 1080p video playback, and a 1.3 MP web-cam. Its battery can keep the device going for 8 hours before needing a recharge. Measuring 298 x 204 x 15.6 mm (when completely folded), the LaVie Y weighs 1.24 kg. It will be launched after October 26.