Posted 10/06/09 at 12:00:00 PM by Loyd Case

As a developer of graphics technology, Nvidia has been incredibly successful. Despite severe competitive pressure from AMD, Nvidia’s desktop GPUs still hold the number one market share, though AMD recently upped the ante with the release of the Radeon HD 5870, which is hands down the fastest single GPU card today.

It’s clear, though, after Nvidia’s recent GPU Technology Conference, that the company’s aspirations lie well beyond building graphics chips. That’s not a revelation – Nvidia’s been saying this for several years now. For an industry observer, though, the GPU Tech Conference lays out Nvidia’s model for moving beyond just graphics.

That model, ironically, is Intel.

Read More

Posted 09/09/09 at 12:15:39 PM by Paul Lilly

With all the hoopla surrounding lifetime warranties by the likes of EVGA, BFG, and XFX, you probably don't own a Foxconn-branded videocard anyway. But in case you do, you may want to hold onto it as a nostalgiac keepsake, because pretty soon, there won't be any new Foxconn-branded videocards.

Foxconn said it's getting out marketing its own brand and has instead rearranged its Channel Service Division (CSD), along with most of its 9,000 employees, to its OEM division.

That doesn't mean Foxconn will suddenly disappear, however. The company still expects to ship 6-7 million of its own-brand motherboards in 2009, which is a whopping 5 million more than it shipped in 2008. As for videocards and other OEM products, the company expects shipments to reach 30 million units, those products just won't bear the Foxconn brand.

Read More

Posted 06/29/09 at 10:00:00 AM by Will Smith

Just in case you missed our review of the new GTX 295 reference board last month, we’ll revisit the high points. To make a GeForce GTX 295, Nvidia sandwiched a fairly large heatsink between a pair of boards—that’s one kick-ass sandwich!

The GTX 295’s GPUs are basically modified GTX 280 GPUs. They’ve got the same shader core configuration as the GTX 280, but Nvidia shrunk the chip’s die from 65nm to 55nm, and lowered the core clock speed to 576MHz (the same as the GTX 260). These two adjustments help keep power requirements and heat generation under control, while the full complement of 240 shader cores keeps the frame rate up in shader-limited benchmarks, such as Crysis and Far Cry 2.

Read More