It took a bit of waiting, but those Catalyst 9.5 downloads that started appearing on the web days ago are finally available direct from AMD. For those of you who grew impatient and snagged the download from an alternate source, they should be the same ones now appearing on AMD's site.

Catalyst 9.5 promises a handful of performance improvements, including:

• Performance gains of up to 11 percent for single GPU and ATI CrossFireX configurations with AA enabled in Unigine Tropics DX9
• Up to a 10 percent boost in Company of Heroes
• Up to a 10 percent boost in BattleForce for CrossFireX configurations

Several bugs have been squashed in the new release, a handful of which apply to Windows 7. Win 7 owners should no longer see dropped frames while playing certain Blu-ray interlaced content, and moving a video clip across an extended desktop should no longer cause the system to flicker or for the media player to stop working.

Release Notes (PDF)
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Try to imagine where 3D gaming would be today if not for the graphics processing unit, or GPU. Without it, you wouldn't be tredging through the jungles of Crysis in all its visual splendor, nor would you be fending off endless hordes of fast-moving zombies at high resolutions. For that to happen, it takes a highly specialized chip designed for parallel processing to pull off the kinds of games you see today, the same ones that wouldn't be possible on a CPU alone. Going forward, GPU makers will try to extend the reliance on videocards to also include physics processing, video encoding/decoding, and other tasks that where once handled by the CPU.

It's pretty amazing when you think about how far graphics technology has come. To help you do that, we're going to take a look back at every major GPU release since the infancy of 3D graphics. Join us as we travel back in time and relive releases like 3dfx's Voodoo3 and S3's ViRGE lineup. This is one nostalgiac ride you don't want to miss!

It all starts after the jump!

Intel's Larrabee project might rank as one of the most anticipated technology releases in a long while, and it looks like we'll have to wait just a bit longer than originally thought. It was expected that Intel would launch its many-cored cGPU sometime in late 2009, however the chip maker is now saying it plans to launch Larrabee in 2010.

Not a whole lot of details are known about Larrabee, only that it's a x86-based discrete graphics solution built around the second generation Pentium processor technology with the P54C core. When Larrabee launches, it will come in several iterations, the lowest of which will comprise no less than 8 cores. On the higher end, look for at least 32 cores and a 2GHz or faster clockspeed.

While it all sounds impressive, Intel's Jospeh Schultz did say that it would be a "big challenge" to compete with products from Nvidia and AMD.

Another first-quarter revenue report, and another loss, this one from Nvidia. According to the report, the GPU chip maker's revenue slid 42 percent from last year, posting a net loss of $201.3 million, or 37 cents per share. That's a big change over last year when Nvidia posted a profit to the tune of $176.8 million, or 30 cents per share.

But hey, it seems everyone's numbers are down, and for Nvidia, analysts were anticipating worse numbers. While Nvidia's revenue of $664.2 million is a far cry from the $1.15 billion it posted last year, Wall Street had Nvidia pegged at $534.4 million, undershooting by $130 million.

To help cope with the recession, Nvidia has begun cutting back on its inventory, a method which seems to be working so far. Inventory was scaled back from 144 to 64 days sequentially, CNet reports, and revenue grew 38 percent sequentially from last quarter.

"We made good progress managing expenses and significantly reducing inventory," said Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO of Nvidia.