BFG Technologies, the leading North American and European supplier of advanced NVIDIA-based 3D graphics cards, power supplies and other PC enthusiast products, announced today the BFG GeForce GTX 260 MAXCORE graphics cards in three factory overclocked versions; OC, OC2, and OCX. BFG's GeForce GTX 260 MAXCORE graphics cards boast 216 processing cores-24 more cores than a standard GeForce GTX 260. This extra processing power combined with BFG's rock-solid factory overclocking provides end users with enthusiast-class performance and the protection of a lifetime warranty.

Bad news for the manufacturers, possible good news for consumers. NVIDIA revised the GeForce GTX 260 (D10U-102) graphics processor (GPU) in an attempt to stamp performance superiority over the Radeon HD 4870. While from a technical standpoint there are mixed views about this move, with some suggesting the performance leads aren't significant over its older version, while others finding it a good move with potential for more performance gains with tweaks and overclocking, it cannot be denied that for the new GTX 260 to fit into the market, there are some tough maths are at play.

The new GPU will certainly affect the prices of products across the segment, including those of the older GTX 260. If the GTX 260 gets a significantly lower price compared to the newer version or if this gets a significantly higher price, it could affect the sales of either products, and profits in general for manufacturers. Concerns over the new GPU causing over-stocking of the older GPU-based products loom at large, reports industry observer DigiTimes. Overstock is a condition where demand for a product is much lower or on a decline in relation to the supply. If such a situation arises where the D10U-102 sells much better than the older GTX 260 which is in good stock, manufacturers could be forced to sell the older cards at lower prices, as that is a common reaction to overstock commodities. Expect great prices caused not due to inter-brand competition, but intra-brand competition.

ASUS prepared a new entry-level video card based on the GeForce 9400 GT with 1 GB memory. The EN9400GT/HTP/1G card from ASUS comes equipped with 1 GB of DDR2 memory. The card is based on the entry-level GeForce 9400 GT graphics core. The core is clocked at 550 MHz with 800 MHz for the memory and 1375 MHz for the shaders, 16 in number. It uses a 128-bit wide memory interface. The card supports NVIDIA SLI multi-GPU technology and features standard DVI, D-Sub and S-Video/Composite outputs. Given the performance band GeForce 9400 GT falls in, features such as 1 GB of memory and SLI make it a novelty product aimed at the entry-level market.

NVIDIA is dressing up a new version of the GeForce GTX 260 GPU as reported earlier, with a revision that carries 216 shader units (against 192 for the original GTX 260). Chinese website Bear Eyes has pictured the new GPU. Other than the increased shader count, that should provide a significant boost to the shader compute power, other GPU parameters such as clock speeds remain the same. The core features 72 texturing units and 28 ROPs. The core is technically called G200-103-A2 (the older core was G200-100-A2). The card reviewed by Bear Eyes was made by Inno3D, called GeForce GTX 260 Gold. This shows that the GTX 260 brand name is here to stay.

Notebook PC makers and users desire the realism and performance of a discrete graphics processing unit (GPU), but they still demand maximum battery life. Now Sony, Fujitsu Siemens, and BenQ have announced the availability of notebooks that let users dynamically switch between a discrete NVIDIA GeForce GPU and Intel Centrino 2 integrated graphics without rebooting, giving users the choice of more visual computing performance or reducing power demands to extend battery life.

All GeForce 9M Series GPUs support the hybrid graphics feature, but the notebook must be designed to support the technology. The hybrid graphics feature is currently available in the following new notebook models:

It is becoming a market trend of people avoiding entry-level discrete graphics alotgether to either choose a low-mid graphics card or settle for motherboards with integrated graphics to suit their needs, with that segment of buyers. Both NVIDIA and AMD that have chipset divisions sought to capitalize on this with releasing integrated graphics laden system chipsets, the only difference being that NVIDIA makes them for both AMD and Intel CPU platforms. With AMD platform, NVIDIA already has a dominating market position while it tries to catch up with Intel's homegrown chipsets in its plaform.

Towards the end of this month, NVIDIA could release a new chipset called MCP7A that aims to compete with AMD's recent 780G and 790GX IGPs that took IGP performance to the next level. The MCP7A comes with the GeForce 9400 GT graphics core embedded. The chipset comes in two variants: MCP7A-U and MCP7A-S. The former has GeForce 9400 GT in specifications and speeds identical to the discrete GPU, while the latter has a slightly toned down variant of the same GPU in terms of clock speeds, called GeForce 9300. The difference between the two is that the 9300 will be clocked at 450MHz and 1200MHz (core, shader) compared to the 9400 GT in its reference specs. of 580MHz, 1500MHz (core, shader).

Graphics card manufacturer NVIDIA is being sued for withholding information over defect GPUs and thus causing investors to lose money. NVIDIA shareholder Lisa Miller has filed the suit in the US district, seeking for legal action against NVIDIA. The lawsuit alleges that the company knew of the problem last year, but didn't disclose the issue to shareholders. Earlier this summer NVIDIA by its own admitted that it had a problem with faulty GPUs indeed. In July NVIDIA confirmed that there's a thermal problem with its GPUs. The problem is in the thermal stress caused when the chip powers up and then powers down. The difference in temperature caused the solder attaching the chips to crack and fail. After the issue was made public it led to an immediate stock reaction. The company's share price fell 31% from $18.78 USD to $12.98 for one night, effectively wiping $3 billion off the company's and shareholders' pockets in less than 24 hours. If NVIDIA tries to cover the cost of repairs and returns for the faulty GPUs, it would cost up to $200 million. Because of the obvious losses, the shareholders now want some compensation that needs to be paid by NVIDIA. "The truth is that, at least as early as November 2007, NVIDIA and the other defendants have known about these unprecedented failure rates as well as their 'root causes'," the lawsuit claims. "Nevertheless, for at least eight months, defendants concealed from NVIDIA investors these defects and their obvious impact on the company's financial condition and future business prospects," it adds. Till the moment of this release, there is still no official response from NVIDIA. You can find the full lawsuit in .pdf format here.

SPARKLE Computer Co., Ltd., the professional VGA card manufacturer and supplier, today proudly introduced the SPARKLE GeForce 9800 GTX+ Graphics Cards with SPARKLE own designed great non-reference PCB, which brings better performance, stability and native HDMI support compared with NVIDIA reference design.

Browsing the Internet on a mobile device will take a leap forward with today's announcement that NVIDIA Corporation and Opera Software are collaborating to bring the full desktop Web-browsing experience, including support for JavaScript, accelerated vector graphics, and video content, to smartphones and mobile Internet devices. As a result, NVIDIA will offer an optimized Opera 9.5 browser in its suite of pre-integrated, in-house and third-party software for the NVIDIA Tegra family of computer-on-chip Windows Mobile and Windows CE solutions.

"Seamless, effortless Internet access is critical to any state-of-the-art connected mobile device, and the combination of Opera 9.5 and NVIDIA Tegra will deliver the full Web experience into the palm of your hand," said Neil Trevett, vice president of mobile content at NVIDIA. "Opera and NVIDIA are cooperating to create a powerful browsing experience that will truly make the Internet an integral part of the advanced Tegra mobile visual computing experience."

Slides published during a press meeting held at ELSA's headquarters in Shenzhen, China reveals what look like NVIDIA's future graphics processors (GPU). Although not quite playing on the global stage, ELSA is a popular channel vendor operating in China that concentrates on Asian markets. ELSA showcased several of its products. During a press event where its consumer graphics plans were discussed, ELSA published a slide that shows two future GPUs from NVIDIA, codenamed GT206 and GT212. These GPUs are positioned to succeed current flagship GPUs as in the G200. The slide shows a graph with launch time on the x-axis and performance projection on the y-axis. It can be inferred that GT206 is going to succeed the current GeForce GTX 260 and the GT212 succeeds GTX 280. Time scales show that GT206 comes out towards the very end of this year, and GT212 comes out sometime in Q1, 2009.

Tegra is NVIDIA's System on a Chip (SoC) platform. It takes NVIDIA's supreme expertise in the field of visual computing and architectural finesse to SoC that is projected to have a large market in the near future in several industries, mainly consumer electronics and automobiles. Heavyweights in the automobile industry such as Daimler AG (Mercedes Benz), FIAT Group (Alfa Romeo, Ferrari, Fiat, Lancia, Maserati), V.A.G. group (Audi, Bentley, Bugatti, Lamborghini, Porsche, Seat, Skoda, VW) have lobbied around the Terga technology to be used to enhance their products.

As automobiles manufacturers venturing into a realm of new technology of compact computing, they would prefer proven and stable technologies from NVIDIA over future tech. For this matter, NVIDIA has derived some versions of the graphics processor part of Tegra on the GeForce 6 series. It makes it fully DirectX 9.0c compatible and capable of running up to three or more displays. Some variants NVIDIA plans to sell V.A.G. group includes a GPU derived from GeForce 9600 GT albeit much lower speeds (since it's not required to work to its potential). Futuremark has already showcased its 3D dashboard software for Audi which could harness the power of Tegra to display a futuristic dashboard panel that provides drivers with information on the car's operation along with maps and guidance in 3D.

A product change notification (PCN) document by NVIDIA The Inquirer claims to have access to, indicates changes to the bump materials of several NVIDIA graphics processors (GPUs). Affected by this change are popular GPUs such as G92 and G92b (55nm). Changes include replacement of a High-Pb solder (95% Pb / 5% Sn) bump material with Eutectic Solder (63% Sn / 37% Pb). Bumps are those parts of the die that establish electrical contact with the leads/pins of the FC-BGA package. Failures of these bumps are irreparable leading to permanent damage. This follows several events that lead to NVIDIA owning up defects in certain mobile graphics and MCP parts.

Implications of this PCN are:

• Current G92 and G92b are weaker and could be subject to failures similar to those products already diagnosed with failing packages and official announcements issued.
  Read full story

GPU Café published information on future competition lineups., which shows the entry of a "GeForce 9550 GT" stacked up against the Radeon HD 4670. Sources in the media have pointed to the the possibility that the the RV730 based HD 4670 from ATI outperforms NVIDIA cards in its current lineup, relative to the segments where GeForce 9500 GT sits. The HD 4650 could exchange a few blows with the GeForce 9500 GT with equal or better levels of performance while the HD 4670 surpasses it.

The entry of a GeForce 9550 GT shows the 9500 GT cannot compete with the HD 4650, a newer price demographic of ~ $129 is shown in that chart that not only indicates prices, but also shows the HD 4650's lead over 9500 GT is so significant that ATI could be comfortable with asking you $20 more than what 9500 GT asks, relative to the range. GPU Café reports that the 9550 GT would be a toned-down (and shrunk) G94, as in the 55 nm G94b, featuring 64 shader processors and a 192-bit memory bus (and presumably, memory configurations such as 384 MB or 768 MB of GDDR3 memory).

Apparently NVIDIA has decided to give all Intel owners a big present by introducing the native support of its SLI technology for Intel Nehalem. This information was published first at The Tech Report by Scott Wasson, and comes directly from the final editors meeting of NVISION. According to Tom Peterson, director of Technical Marketing for MCP products at NVIDIA, the company will authorize native SLI support on Intel X58 motherboards without the need of its nForce 200 chip - under certain circumstances. Those circumstances actually include a certification process of every Intel X58 motherboard at NVIDIA's Santa Clara certification lab. Once in the lab, the boards must pass basic testing for functionality, slot placement, and other criterions. After that the makers of these boards must select from a menu of licensing options available to them. Afterward to be certified boards will also be required to display an "SLI Certified" logo on their boxes and other marketing materials. Once the above steps are completed without a problem, NVIDIA will provide the board maker with an approval "cookie" key that it must embed in the system BIOS. The combination of this approval key and an Intel X58 chipset will then unlock SLI support in NVIDIA's ForceWare driver software. The whole process of certification is reported to be cheaper than the cost of the nForce 200 chip alone, which is around US $30. That's the interesting part you need to know, now we wait. The full story is posted here.

NVIDIA has recently been experiencing higher-than-normal failure rates with some of its GPUs. Charlie Demerjian from The Inq. speculates that NVIDIA could actually have a much larger problem than what it admits to - it is quite possible, according to Demerjian, that not only mobile GPUs are affected, but the desktop G92 and G94 could also carry the fault.

The failures, some sources say, are caused by a solder bump that connects the I/O termination of the silicon chip to the pad on the substrate. In Nvidia's GPUs, this solder bump is created using high-lead. A thermal mismatch between the chip and the substrate has substantially grown in recent chip generations, apparently leading to fatigue cracking. What supports the theory that a high-lead solder bump in fact is at fault is the fact that Nvidia ordered an immediate switch to use eutectic solders instead of high-lead versions in the last week of July. Eutectic solders are believed to solve the problem of fatigue cracking.

NVIDIA and Futuremark's same studio will join their latest technologies in Shattered Horizon, the upcoming first-person shooter game which was officially unveiled last week at the Leipzig Games Convention in Germany. Shattered Horizon, a multiplayer first-person shooter developed by Futuremark Games Studio, will fully utilize NVIDIA's PhysX technology it was announced today. This leads us to believe that when released the game will feature a lot of goodies like totally destructive space environment, stunning lighting effects and zero gravity physics. "We are excited to be working with Futuremark on their first original game," said Roy Taylor, NVIDIA vice president of content relations. "By utilizing the advanced features that NVIDIA PhysX technology provides, Shattered Horizon will deliver a compelling, visual, and highly interactive experience to gamers." For more information on Shattered Horizon, please visit this page, a 130MB HD .wmv game trailer is also available for download here.

POINT OF VIEW, well known for its range of NVIDIA based Graphics cards, is launching today a new GeForce 9 series graphics card, the GeForce 9400 GT.

This graphics card will be available both in a passive and active version. Especially the passive version is perfectly suitable for Media Center use due to its low power consumption, cool temperatures and silent operation.

ZOTAC International, a leading manufacturer of NVIDIA-based graphics cards, today unleashes its latest entry-level GeForce 9 series graphics cards for budget gamers on the second day of NVISION 08 - the ZOTAC GeForce 9400GT DDR2 and GeForce 9400GT DDR2 ZONE Edition. The new ZOTAC GeForce 9400GT DDR2 series enables users to bring their PCs to life with NVIDIA PureVideo HD technology and NVIDIA unified architecture for smoother high-definition video playback and realistic gaming capabilities.

Today, at the NVISION 2008 conference, NVIDIA Corporation in conjunction with Pegasys Inc., makers of TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress multi-format video encoding software, showcased a technology demonstration to optimize video processing with the massively parallel architecture of the GPU.

Using NVIDIA CUDA technology (a C-like programming language programming for the GPU), Pegasys is taking advantage of the parallel processing capabilities of an NVIDIA GeForce GPU to create a GPU-enabled beta version of TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress software. The software is used to dramatically increase video decode and processing speed by as much as 446% on a GeForce GPU.

Team R21 of FiringSquad studied the credibility of a rumor on NVIDIA materializing its long-term processor plans. They said they would be surprised if NVIDIA didn't have an x86 plan chalked out at least at a very interior level. The Inquirer speculated earlier that NVIDIA could lift the covers from its x86 plans as early as some time this week, during the ongoing NVISION event. The credibility of this rumor is based purely on who's breeding it. Many point it to have been doing rounds during IDF.

Reality bites: NVIDIA lacks a regularized x86 license which has to be issued by Intel to be able to use x86 in their products. Any mass announcement at this point could cost them. NVISION however looks to be an ideal substrate for discussions on CUDA and NVIDIA's SoC (System on a Chip) plans.

The NVIDIA chipset division has decided to take on chipsets (core-logic) from both AMD and Intel in their respective platforms. To begin with, the nForce 780a SLI has been given a major update. The Advanced Clock Calibration (ACC) feature has been added to this chipset that allows overclocking competitive to the latest chipset from AMD, the SB 750 southbridge which is used on high-end motherboards based on the 790 GX or 790 FX northbridges. NVIDIA will connect the southbridge to the JTAG interface and then update the BIOS to support ACC for up to 10% better Phenom overclocks.

On to the Intel platform, and NVIDIA plans to release a new chipset called the nForce 770i SLI. Think of it as NVIDIA's answer to the P45 DDR3 chipset which provides Crossfire support (Dual PCI-Express slots with PCI-E 2.0 x8 bandwidth each in Crossfire mode). The nForce 770i will use a DDR3 memory controller, this is what differentiates it from the nForce 750i SLI, the chipset will support the 2-way SLI in the electrical PCI-E 2.0 x8 format.

Update:
It is known that existing motherboards in the market cannot be updated with this feature by means of a BIOS update, addition of this feature requires a hardware-level modification. Provided is a company slide from NVIDIA.(Source: Expreview)

Often underappreciated by those who only casually play games, fast and accurate physical models and calculations are a key to a game's playability and realism. From the effect of explosions on nearby objects, to the impacts of car accidents, to how a character reacts when hit, physics is as important to realism as high-quality graphics. Because of this, Realtime Worlds' upcoming massively multiplayer online game, APB, will take advantage of NVIDIA GeForce GPUs and PhysX technology to enhance the game's free-form combat and real-time driving environments.

APB will bring players into a living, breathing city where cash is king and territory equals respect. Scheduled for release in 2009, APB is one of many titles to take advantage of NVIDIA PhysX technology, the world's most pervasive development platform for physics acceleration in interactive entertainment.

Ray-tracing is the buzzword with consumer and professional graphics these days. It's a technique with which accurate representation of light with its behaviour in adherence with the laws of physics can be done when generating 3D computer graphics.

NVIDIA took ray-tracing to an interactive level with its work on an interactive real-time ray-tracing application. Currently NVIDIA has a larger stash of intellectual property in the field of ray-tracing than other players such as AMD or Intel, with the acquisition of MentalRay, a company that is pretty-much a standard in Hollywood.

Intel is readying its first wave of processors based on the Nehalem-derived Bloomfield core which should hit shelves sometime this autumn. Meanwhile motherboard manufacturers seem to be in a rush to bring in supportive LGA 1366 motherboards based on the spanking-new Intel X58 chipset around that time. Intel had reportedly preponed launch of the Bloomfield processors till September. It was then known that motherboard manufacturers wouldn't be able to keep up and would take a little later (as in late October) to deck their shelves with supportive motherboards.

Bit-Tech interviewed Richard Liu of ASUS (read here). It can be read that ASUS would be out with not only Intel X58 based motherboards by the (new) launch date of these Intel processors, but also have NVIDIA SLI-supportive motherboards with BR-04 chips ready by that time.

MSI rolled out two non-reference graphics accelerators based on the GeForce 9800 GT and 9500 GT under the Zilent banner. MSI uses Zilent to brand its products such as graphics cards and motherboards where the acoustic envelope is significantly reduced without affecting the thermal envelope. The first card, N9800GT-Zilent is based on the newer G92b 55nm silicon fabricated core. It uses a cooler designed by Zalman which claims to have a smaller acoustic footprint than the stock NVIDIA cooler. The cooler is a double-slot solution and consists of four copper heat-pipes emerging out of the die contact area into a grill of aluminum fins. Central to this grill is what looks like a 60mm fan. MSI decided to step up the memory, this card comes with 1 GB of GDDR3 memory clocked at 950 MHz (1900 MHz DDR). The core is overclocked to 660 MHz. As with other GeForce 9800 GT cards, it supports NVIDIA HybridPower technology.

The second release is the N95000GT-MD512Z/D2. This card is completely silent, it has no moving parts. It consists of a core contact from which two aluminum heat-pipes convey heat away to aluminum fins behind the card that dissipate it. It comes with a HDMI port, and the usual DVI and D-Sub connectors. It comes with 512 MB of DDR2 memory clocked at 1000 MHz. The core is clocked at 550 MHz.