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.

NVIDIA suffered its first red-quarter in five years. There are several contributors to this, namely an up to US $200M write-off to cover expenses in recalling and restoring faulty mobile graphics processors.

Another factor has been a replenished product lineup from competitor AMD/ATI that is taking on NVIDIA products at mid thru high and enthusiast segments of the market, in essence ATI now has products to counter NVIDIA at every possible segment, with more dressing up to go to office.

Seeking Alpha spoke with CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, he was quoted saying:

We underestimated the price performance of our competitor's most recent GPU, which led us to mis-position our fall lineup. The first step of our response was to reset our price to reflect competitive realities. Our action put us again in a strong competitive position but we took hard hits with respect to our overall GPU ASPs and ultimately to our gross margins. The price action was particularly difficult since we are just ramping 55-nanometer and the weak market resulted in taking longer than expected to work through our 65-nanometer inventory.

Huang says that with their transit to the 55nm silicon fabrication process, they hope to do better.

Released during Siggraph 2008, the following NVIDIA driver release supports the latest OpenGL 3.0 specs. It's good to know, that this driver is aimed at developers only, and the new OpenGL 3.0 and GLSL 1.30 features are not enabled by default. They can be unlocked using the nvemulate utility, as described here. You'll also need one of the following graphics cards to enable the OpenGL 3.0 and GLSL 1.30 functionality.

• Desktop: GeForce 8000 series or higher; GeForce GTX 260, 280; Quadro FX 370, 570, 1700, 3700, 4600, 4700x2, 5600
• Notebook: GeForce 8000 series or higher; Quadro FX 360M, 370M, 570M, 770M, 1600M, 1700M, 2700M, 3600M, 3700M

DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA Driver 177.89 - Open GL 3.0

NVIDIA Corporation today reported financial results for the second quarter of fiscal 2009 ended July 27, 2008. For the second quarter of fiscal 2009, revenue decreased to $892.7 million compared to $935.3 million for the second quarter of fiscal 2008, a decrease of five percent. For the six months ended July 27, 2008, revenue increased to $2.05 billion compared to $1.78 billion for the six months ended July 29, 2007, an increase of 15 percent.

Now that the PhysX engine is a lot closer to every NVIDIA owner, new benchmarks designed to test these physics capabilities are unavoidable. First among many are the developers at oZone3D, releasing their first version of FluidMark, a physics benchmark based on NVIDIA's PhysX engine that measures the physics processing capabilities of CPUs, Ageia cards and OpenGL 2.0 compliant graphics card like NVIDIA GeForce 5/6/7/8/9/GTX200 (and higher), AMD/ATI Radeon 9600+, 1k/2k/3k/4k (and higher) or a S3 Graphics Chrome 400 series with the latest graphics drivers. This benchmark performs a fluid simulation by imitating the renderering of lava. Real physics parameters such as viscosity are used. SPH (Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics) algorithm is enabled to increase the realism of the simulation. To test the FluidMark v1.0.0 please click here.

Demand for better graphics performance and programmability within the professional notebook market continues to increase as animators, designers and engineers work with larger 3D models, datasets and images. NVIDIA Corporation, the worldwide leader in visual computing technologies, continues to address the demand with the introduction of a new series of NVIDIA Quadro FX mobile GPUs, featuring an NVIDIA CUDA Parallel Computing Processor. Leading workstation manufacturers such as Dell, Fujitsu Siemens Computers, HP and Lenovo are now offering the new series of Quadro FX mobile GPUs across a wide range of professional notebook workstations.

Although it was speculated by many that 3-way SLI would be a standard feature with the GeForce 9800 GT graphics cards, reference designs of the card were just a little more than an improvement over the 'previous generation' 8800 GT. 3-way SLI didn't turn out to be a feature standard to all 9800 GT cards, at least not the reference NVIDIA designs. ASUS took up the initiative and prepared the ASUS EN9800GT HybridPower. This non-reference design supports 3-way SLI multi-GPU technology, uses 4-phase VRM circuitry, and the signature ASUS Glaciator GPU fansink. It uses 512 MB of GDDR3 memory. There's no word on the card's parameters or pricing yet.

NVIDIA has achieved an agreement with Transmeta Corporation today, to license Transmeta's LongRun and LongRun2 technologies and other intellectual property for use in connection with NVIDIA products. The agreement grants to NVIDIA a non-exclusive and fully paid-up license to all of Transmeta's patents and patent applications, and a non-exclusive license and transfer of certain Transmeta advanced power management and other computing technologies. Under the agreement, NVIDIA agrees to pay Transmeta a one-time, non-refundable license fee of $25.0 million. The agreement also includes mutual general releases of all claims by both parties. "We are very pleased to have achieved this license agreement with NVIDIA," said Les Crudele, president and CEO of Transmeta. "We believe that this agreement both illustrates the value of Transmeta's intellectual property and technologies to our industry and realizes for Transmeta stockholders an immediate return from the strategic licensure of our intellectual property rights."

BFG has announced that it will be offering its rebate program to Europe for the NVIDIA GTX 260 and GTX 280 graphics cards following price cuts last month (which we covered here ).
To qualify for this rebate program the qualifying products needed to have been purchased between June 16th and July 16th, 2008 and registered within 30 days of purchase.
Closing date is August 20th 2008.

A new NVIDIA beta driver leaked today over the web space, enabling full PhysX support for all GeForce 9800 GTX, GeForce 9800 GTX+, GeForce GTX 260, GeForce GTX 280 and GeForce 9500 GT graphics cards. The download link for this driver is provided by our collegues over at Expreview. Download NVIDIA PhysX 8.07.18 driver from here. Also note that this release is considered a beta, use with caution and at your own risk. One final line before I finish, release 8.07.18 is also reported to work with GeForce 9600 GT and 8600 GT cards although they are not listed in the supported list.

MSI Computer, a leading manufacturer of computer hardware products and solutions, is pleased to announce the release of the new GX620/GX720 Gaming Notebook. Winner of a Best Choice Award at COMPUTEX 2008, the GX620 's Blu-Ray player, MSI's VIVID Image Enhancement Technology, the NVIDIA GeForce 9600 GT 3D graphics card and Dolby 7.1 digital surround sound capabilities guarantee the ultimate gaming or movie watching experience. This powerful notebook is housed in a sleek yet tough alloy case with strong red accents, and features user friendly quick launch touch sensors.

ZOTAC International, an award-winning NVIDIA AIC, today unleashes the latest edition to its ZONE Edition line of quiet graphics cards - the ZOTAC GeForce 9800 GTX+ ZONE Edition. The new ZOTAC GeForce 9800 GTX+ ZONE Edition delivers the power of NVIDIA GeForce 9 series graphics power, PhysX technology and PureVideo HD video processing technology into a virtually silent graphics card. The ZOTAC GeForce 9800 GTX+ ZONE Edition is quieted by a custom water-cooling system and able to deliver phenomenal visuals and frame rate in DirectX 10 and OpenGL 2.1 titles while maintaining low thermal and noise levels.

If the report from Taiwanese industry observer DigiTimes holds ground, NVIDIA could be wrapping up its chipset division. This was revealed by sources at top motherboard manufacturers who have attended a meeting with NVIDIA where the company sought support from them to continue the chipset business. The manufacturers didn't show obvious or in other words, positive support.

Here's how the exit of nForce could affect the industry and you :

Leadtek Research Inc., the global leading brand for extreme visual graphics technology development, is pleased to announce the launch of new high-end graphics card, WinFast PX9800 GT 512MB. Based on the NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GT graphics processing units and unified architecture design, the new graphics card can provide customers the best-in-classic gaming performance.

Walton Chaintech, the world's renowned graphics card and memory module manufacturer, announces today the GeForce 9 series GSE9500GT DDR3 512MB graphics card, the officially appointed gaming graphics card for the famous game C.S. On-Line in Taiwan. CHAINTECH GSE9500GT is the mainstream graphics card not only geared by the latest NVIDIA GeForce series core G96 technology but with an easier price tag, providing consumers a two-times more exciting visual experience than its prior version.