Industry watcher DigiTimes has some good news today. Apparently, disturbed by the rising presence of ATI in the discrete graphics card market, NVIDIA is planning a counter attack with the easiest way possible - cut the prices of its products. If the information is right, NVIDIA is going to slash the prices across its entire high-end GeForce GTX 200 line-up, as well as the mainstream GeForce 9800 GT and GeForce 9600 GT series. Unfortunately, the other piece of information as of when and by how much the prices will go down is unknown.

With AMD making gains in the discrete graphics card market - rising to around 40% in third-quarter 2008 according to a recent report from Jon Peddie Research (JPR) - Nvidia is planning to cut its graphics card prices in an attempt to curb further loss of market share, according to sources at graphics card makers.
AMD anticipates taking 50% of the market after reducing prices for its ATI Radeon HD 4000 series products, but to counter Nvidia has also made moves to cut prices for its GeForce GTX 200, 9800 GT and 9600 GT series.

ZOTAC International, a leading manufacturer of NVIDIA-based graphics cards and motherboards, today unleashes a new software bundle featuring Futuremark's 3DMark Vantage Advanced Edition - a leading 3D tool that evaluates a system's 3D capabilities using Microsoft DirectX 10 demos. The new 3DMark Vantage Advanced Edition bundle will ship with ZOTAC GeForce 9800 GT, 9800 GTX+, GTX 2602 and GTX 280 standard, AMP! Edition and AMP2! Edition models, in addition to each card's respective game bundles.

NVIDIA today responded on the Rambus accusation made last Friday. It's not a lot of information, but it's enough to tell that NVIDIA is confident of what it is doing and its partners are to be afraid of nothing.

NVIDIA has hosted a meeting with their AIC partners today to keep them updated about the Rambus issue. VR-Zone has learned that NVIDIA continues to deny all allegations brought forward by Rambus as they believe everything is legal so far and will co-operate fully with ITC. NVIDIA stressed that their customers will not be affected by this allegation. Also they mentioned that this case will likely to drag for the next 12-18 months.

Professionals searching for oil, diagnosing illness or styling the next high-performance luxury vehicle all have one thing in common, the need for advanced visual computing solutions. NVIDIA Corporation, the world leader in visual computing technologies, today unveiled the most powerful professional graphics card in graphics history - the NVIDIA Quadro FX 5800.
"The size and complexity of data is growing at an exponential rate. The challenge for today's professional is to make sense of the mountain of data by distilling it into a form they can comprehend, analyze and use to make impactful decisions," said Jeff Brown, general manager, Professional Solutions, NVIDIA. "At stake can be billions of investment dollars, or even people's lives. The Quadro FX 5800 has advanced features to allow massive
datasets to be viewed beyond traditional 3D enabling professionals to make fast and accurate decisions."

The RV770 graphics processor changed AMD's fortunes in the graphics processor industry and put it back in the race for supremacy over the larger rival NVIDIA. The introduction of RV770-based products had a huge impact on the mid-range and high-end graphics card markets, which took NVIDIA by surprise. Jen-Hsun Huang, the CEO of NVIDIA has been quoted saying that they had underestimated their competitor's latest GPU, referring to RV770. While the Radeon HD 4870 graphics accelerator provided direct competition to the 192 shader-laden GeForce GTX 260, the subsequent introduction of a 216 shader variant saw it lose ground, leaving doubling of memory size to carve out the newer SKU, the Radeon HD 4870 1GB. Performance benchmarks of this card from all over the media have been mixed, but show that AMD isn't giving up this chance for gaining technological supremacy.

In Q4 2008, NVIDIA is expected to release three new graphics cards: GeForce GTX 270 and GeForce GTX 290. The cards are based on NVIDIA's G200 refresh, the G200b, which incorporates a new manufacturing technology to facilitate higher clock-speeds, stepping up performance. This looks to threaten the market position of AMD's RV770, since it's already established that G200 when overclocked to its stable limits, achieves more performance than RV770 pushed to its limits. This leaves AMD with some worries, since it cannot afford to lose the wonderful market-position its cash-cow, the RV770 is currently in, to an NVIDIA product that outperforms it by a significant margin, in its price-domain. The company's next generation graphics processor would be the RV870, which still has some time left before it could be rushed in, since its introduction is tied to the constraints of foundry companies such as TSMC, and the availability of the required manufacturing process (40nm silicon lithography) by them. While TSMC takes its time working on that, there's a fair bit of time left, for RV770 to face NVIDIA, which given the circumstances, looks a lost battle. Is AMD going to do something about its flagship GPU? Will AMD make an effort to maintain its competitiveness before the next round of the battle for technological supremacy begins? The answer is tilting in favour of yes.

NVIDIA Corporation today reported financial results for the third quarter of fiscal 2009 ended October 26, 2008.

For the third quarter of fiscal 2009, revenue was $897.7 million compared to $1.12 billion for the third quarter of fiscal 2008, a decrease of 20 percent. For the nine months ended October 26, 2008, revenue increased to $2.94 billion compared to $2.90 billion for the nine months ended October 28, 2007, an increase of 2 percent.

Rambus Inc., one of the world's premier technology licensing companies specializing in high-speed memory architectures, today announced it has filed a complaint with the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) requesting the commencement of an investigation pertaining to NVIDIA products. The complaint seeks an exclusion order barring the importation, sale for importation, or sale after importation of products that infringe nine Rambus patents from the Ware and Barth families of patents. The accused products include NVIDIA products that incorporate DDR, DDR2, DDR3, LPDDR, GDDR, GDDR2, and GDDR3 memory controllers, including graphics processors, and media and communications processors.

With today's traditional workstation model pricing, many organizations can only afford to deploy professional graphics solutions to select designers and engineers, leaving a significant portion of the workforce with sub-optimal products. This is about to change as NVIDIA Corp. announced today NVIDIA Quadro FX 470, the first integrated professional motherboard GPU, and NVIDIA Quadro FX 370 Low Profile (Quadro FX 370 LP), an entry-level Quadro graphics boards for small form factor systems.

When Toshiba set out to reset the bar for high performance gaming laptops and revamp its flagship gaming line, the company turned to NVIDIA for its expertise in visual computing. The combined efforts of both companies resulted in Toshiba's most powerful gaming laptop to date featuring the new highly integrated GeForce 9400M graphics processing unit (GPU) along with a pair of NVIDIA GeForce 9800M GTS enthusiast-class GPUs. The Toshiba Qosmio X305-Q708 and X305-Q706, the first pair of laptops to incorporate three powerful NVIDIA GPUs, give users a choice between maximum performance and quiet operation.

The year 2008 so far, has been very eventful for the graphics card market. A reinvigorated GPU lineup by ATI, brought in some fierce competition to NVIDIA, which resulted in a tug-of-war with pricing graphics cards in the market, with either company refusing to lose on grounds of pricing. This event, coupled with the announcement of several game titles by game publishers, resulted in bumper-sales of graphics cards, giving the present state of the global economy little or no relevance.

The months to come hold the same amount of importance for both AMD and NVIDIA, where the next round of competition begins with successors to current high-end products being slated. NVIDIA is expected to continue with its monolithic high transistor-count GPU design methodology, while AMD could bring in a little change to the way it uses two efficient GPUs to build powerful products.

ZOTAC International, a leading manufacturer of NVIDIA-based graphics cards, today is shipping three new NVIDIA GeForce 9600 GSO based graphics cards - the GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB, GeForce 9600 GSO 1GB and GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB AMP! Edition. The new ZOTAC GeForce 9600 GSO models usher in a new era of affordable high-performance graphics solutions that are ready to take on the latest Microsoft DirectX 10, OpenGL 2.1 enabled games and NVIDIA CUDA enabled applications. Drawing power from 48 screaming-fast stream processors, the new trio of ZOTAC GeForce 9600 GSO graphics cards will deliver phenomenal visuals and fast frame-rates in the latest 3D games. Powered by NVIDIA's flexible unified architecture, the 48 stream processors are programmable to take on any tasks - whether its gaming or accelerating NVIDIA CUDA-enabled applications.

VIA and NVIDIA have had a decent association going their way for some time now, with the latter offering to design platform core logic (chipset) embedding the GeForce Integrated graphics, which gives VIA's Nano processor, an edge over Intel's Atom platform using obsolete core logic technologies.

Sources at VIA tell DigiTimes, that the deal between the two companies, to work on an inexpensive netbook platform, may have been shelved. The two companies had earlier planned to pair VIA's Nano processor with NVIDIA's MCP79 IGP (which now seems to have a fair bit of success in its Intel Core 2 microprocessor-supportive avatar). Although cooperation on the platform is suspended, VIA said the two are still continuing to cooperate and will showcase co-developed desktop PC (read: nettop) products at CES 2009.

NVIDIA Corporation, the world leader in visual computing technologies, announced it is accepting applications for the NVIDIA Fellowship Program for the 2009-2010 academic year.

Dr. David Kirk, Chief Scientist at NVIDIA, stated: "The NVIDIA Fellowship Program is designed to stimulate and support excellence in visual and parallel computing research in universities worldwide, and to promote communication between NVIDIA's R&D team and outstanding students and professors. Since its inception in 2002, the Program has awarded over $1.6 million in funding to assist 65 Ph.D. students with their research."

One look at ELSA's GLADIAC 998 GTX Plus V2, and you're bound to say "It looks familiar". ELSA has taken advantage of the smaller thermal and electrical footprints of the 55nm GeForce 9800 GTX+, and has borrowed heavily from the design of the GeForce 8800 GTS-512 to come up with this design, both with PCB and cooler designs, albeit a slightly larger fan.

This card will use reference NVIDIA clock speeds for the GeForce 9800 GTX+, that's 738/1836/2200 MHz (core/shader/memory). The PCB length gets a cut from 267mm (reference 9800 GTX(+) PCB) to 229mm. The company claims the card to run about 7 °C cooler than the reference cooler. It sports 512 MB of memory, SLI and dual-DVI connectors with HDCP-compliancy. The card is expected to become available in Japan in the next few days.

ZOTAC International, a leading manufacturer of NVIDIA-based graphics cards and motherboards, today unleashes its latest mini-ITX form factor motherboard -- the ZOTAC nForce 630i-ITX WiFi - a new high-performance platform that occupies minimal space. The new ZOTAC nForce 630i-ITX WiFi combines the power of NVIDIA GeForce 7 series graphics processing with Intel Core 2 processors and wireless network connectivity into a single 170mm2 package. New integrated 802.11b/g WiFi enables the ZOTAC nForce 630i-ITX WiFi to connect to wireless networks for wireless Internet connectivity. Integrated WiFi allows users to enjoy network connectivity without wires or the hassles of large and bulky external wireless cards.

ZOTAC International, a leading manufacture of NVIDIA-based motherboards and graphics cards, today expands its GeForce 9800 series line up with the new ZOTAC GeForce 9800 GTX+ 1GB. The ZOTAC GeForce 9800 GTX+ 1GB pairs the powerful NVIDIA GeForce 9800GTX+ graphics processor with 1GB of high-speed GDDR3 graphics memory for phenomenal visuals in the latest DirectX 10 and OpenGL 2.1-enabled 3D games and applications. The new ZOTAC GeForce 9800 GTX+ 1GB is powered by NVIDIA's award winning unified architecture with 128 stream processors for power-packed experience in 3D games and CUDA-enabled applications. The new 1GB of GDDR3 memory ensures the NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GTX+ graphics processor is able to keep up with the latest texture-intensive and demanding DirectX 10 and OpenGL 2.1 3D games.

EVGA have released a new version of their popular overclocking utility today. The most noticeable improvement is the support for fan control with the latest 180.xx series drivers from NVIDIA, many users were annoyed with the fact that all their fan control programs ceased to work, but EVGA has got their utility updated even before the 180.xx drivers reach WHQL standard. The changes since 1.3.2 are as follows:

• Added fan control support for NVIDIA Forceware 180.xx drivers family.
• EVGA On-Screen Display Server has been updated to version 2.8.0. Added new On-Screen Display rendering mode. Optional configurable On-Screen Display background improves On-Screen Display readability in some applications and prevents it from merging with solid color screen.
• Added G98 graphics processors support.
• Now Precision displays product version in On-Screen Display.

More information and the latest version for download is available here

NVIDIA is expected to continue on its monolithic high-end GPU approach with a few notable GPUs that have been slated for Q4, 2008 and throughout 2009. The visual computing giant will be rolling out a 55nm derivative of the existing G200 graphics processor, codenamed GT206. The GPU is expected to be essentially the same, albeit newer silicon process allowing higher clock-speeds, that push up the performance envelope. The GT206 will be released in Q4, 2008., presumably to cash-in on the X-mas shopping season. It is found that GT206 seems to be having problems with its shader domain, which has pushed its launch for that late.

Following GT206, GT212 and GT216 would be NVIDIA's entries to the 40nm silicon fabrication process. Earlier reports suggested that foundry companies in Taiwan could be ready with the infrastructure to manufacture 40nm GPUs by June/July 2009. For the late second quarter 2009, either GT212, GT216, or simply a new card based the GT206, in a dual-GPU configuration could lead the pack. GT212 and GT216 could release in Q2, 2009. The GT212, GT216 GPUs support GDDR5 memory on a broad memory bus. Towards the end of the year however, NVIDIA will have made its DirectX 11 GPU, the GT300.

NVIDIA seems to be striking gold with its newest platform core logic, the MCP7A, MCP79 chipsets, with the mobile version of MCP79 especially taking the limelight. This is the chipset that Apple uses in its updates to the Macbook Pro. Several PC industry majors such as Acer, ASUS, HP, and Dell, are planning to launch several notebook models based on the MCP79. Some players even project the chipset to grab a 20% share among Intel CPU-based notebook platforms.

ASUS is planning to launch the F50GX notebook using the said chipset with a 16-inch 16:9 aspect ratio panel, and GeForce 9600M discrete graphics card, targeting the gamer market. The company is also planning to launch more MCP79-based notebooks by the end of this year or beginning of next year, according to Tony Chen, general manager of notebook business in ASUS. The general manager of GeForce products at NVIDIA, Ujesh Desai, pointed out that over 10 models of notebooks from global first-tier notebook vendors, will be launched by the end of the year.

World economy may be at risk, but industry experts report that the graphics chip market is literally on fire. According to Jon Peddie Research (JPR), AMD's newly released credible video cards in both its desktop and laptop segments, led to the biggest increase in third-quarter shipments in six years. In the third quarter of 2008, more than 111 million GPUs were shipped, the market researcher said. During the same quarter last year, 91 million GPUs shipped, and 94 million units shipped in the previous quarter. That's an annual increase of 22.5 percent and a quarter-to-quarter increase of almost 18 percent, according to JPR. In the overall market AMD saw a good year-to-year growth of 22.8%, while NVIDIA lost 6.4% year-to-year. For desktop GPUs, AMD/ATI is also on the bright side claiming to 20.3%, while NVIDIA slipped to 32.6%, the other 43.9% of the portion are for Intel. On the laptop front, Intel GPU shipments dropped one point to 56.2 percent, while NVIDIA GPU shipments declined to 21.8 percent, and AMD jumped to 20.9 percent, JPR reported. It was about time and AMD desperately needed this good results, congratulations. ATI's graphics cards are temperately rising their share in the fight with rival NVIDIA.

When ASUS selected the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280 GPU for its new CG6155 extreme gaming machine, it wasn't simply because of its raw graphics horsepower. Creating the best gaming PC used to be a simple matter of using CPUs and GPUs with highest available raw power to deliver the fastest gaming experience. But while CPU performance and raw graphics rendering are still important, new advances in physics, multi-GPU technology, 3D stereo, and parallel computing have amplified the importance of the GPU, making the right GPU a critical component in consumers' buying decisions.

Featuring the award-winning GeForce GTX 280 GPU and a motherboard built around the NVIDIA nForce 790i Ultra SLI MCP platform technology, the ASUS CG6155 gaming PC supports NVIDIA 3-way SLI technology enabling ASUS customers to equip their PC with one, two or even three GeForce GTX 280 GPUs. The CG6155 is a true "extreme gaming" machine, designed for hardcore gaming aficionados who want the maximum visual and physics fidelity possible.

Following the release of OpenGL 3.0 compliant drivers for Windows back in August, NVIDIA has released drivers for Linux/Free BSD, that provide support for the said graphics API. OpenGL functionality is something driver provider manage. Each compliant display driver carries with it, an ICD (installable client driver) for OpenGL.

The driver, 177.61.02 supports OpenGL 3.0, and OpenGL Shader Language (GL-SL) 1.30, with a broad range of compatible hardware already out by NVIDIA. All GeForce 8 Series or newer, Quadro FX 370/360M or newer graphics accelerators are supported. The release supports x86 and x86-64 variants of most Linux and Free-BSD derived operating systems. The driver can be downloaded from NVIDIA's FTP directory here. Please note, that the driver is in a beta stage as of now.

NVIDIA has issued a slide-show, a consolidated presentation taking into account, the findings of some review sources. In short, NVIDIA claims that the GeForce 9800 GT is not only faster than Radeon HD 4830, but also that its value-added features such as the CUDA HPC foundation and PhysX acceleration amount to a superior product all in all. Donanim Haber got their hands on this slide-show before anyone could, so here goes: GeForce 9800 GT vs. Radeon HD 4830 - a presentation by NVIDIA.

Expreview have reported that NVIDIA are sending out samples to its partners for new AM3 supporting motherboards, containing the MCP85 chipset. The IGP will be based around the GeForce 8100/8200/8300, and the new chip is basically the same as the MCP78 which it is superseding, with the exception of the added AM3 support. There are two variants of motherboard using the new chipset and though the specifications appear the same, it is reported that there will be a difference in clock speeds and PureVideo version. It is expected for the new boards to hit retail in Q1 2009.

Following the formal launch of the Far Cry 2 frachise BFG and EVGA, two of the official NVIDIA AIB (Add-In-Board) partners, announced they'll start bundling the game with their GeForce GTX 200 range of graphics cards. That includes both GeForce GTX 260 and GeForce GTX 280.
For a limited time, and while supplies last only, customers who buy any BFG GeForce GTX 200 series graphics card starting from yesterday will get a free full copy of Far Cry 2 ($50 value), a full copy of 3DMark Vantage Advanced Edition ($20 value), and
a BFG branded mini super bright LED electric torch. Find more details here.
EVGA is also offering a free Far Cry 2 copy, as long as you meet the following terms and conditions written here. EVGA's offer is also limited while supplies last.