Posted 10/05/09 at 11:05:31 AM by Paul Lilly

Not everyone considers themselves an early adopter of new technology, and one of the advantages in timing your next upgrade to coincide with new releases is that current parts tend to plummet in price. But if you're looking to score a deal on a GT200 series GPU once Nvidia launches its next-gen parts, you may find the opposite to be true.

According to sources in the retail channel, a shortage of 55nm-made graphics cards is expected to last through the holidays and into the first quarter of 2010. This will affect both AMD and Nvidia, as the two companies divert their attention toward DirectX 11-based 40nm GPUs, DigiTimes reports.

The sources went on to specifically point out Nvidia's GT200 series GPU, saying the graphics chip maker does not plan to increase supply following the launch of Windows 7.

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Posted 07/28/09 at 05:58:06 PM by Andy Salisbury

According to Jon Peddie Research, a firm that specializes in tracking the graphics market, AMD is on the up and up when it comes to graphics card shipments, beating out both Intel and Nvidia.

According to their latest report, many graphics vendors stopped ordering new cards and made sure that their inventories were depleted for the first quarter of this year. But, during that same first quarter, improvement was shown for the sales of Intel, Nvidia and most notably, AMD, who had a growth of 41.5 percent.

It’s expected that Q3 of this year is gearing up to be a very healthy one, thanks to Apple’s Snow Leopard, Windows 7, as well as AMD and Nvidia’s 40nm designs, which should bring better performance and aggressive prices.

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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.

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Posted 03/19/09 at 02:00:00 PM by Will Smith

As a general rule, our belief is that pairing two slow-performing cards using SLI or CrossFire is a bad idea—you’re usually better off running a single faster card. However, the Radeon 4850 X2 delivers astounding performance compared to the single-GPU boards in its price range, spanking the Radeon 4870 and the GeForce GTX 280, with none of the pitfalls that have plagued dual-GPU boards in the past.

At the heart of the board is a pair of ATI’s RV770 GPUs running at 625MHz, just like the single-GPU in the 4850 boards. Each GPU features a full complement of 800 stream processors, which are connected to identical 1GB GDDR3 frame buffers running at 993MHz on a 256-bit bus. Although X2 boards are labeled as featuring 2GB of memory, because the contents of each GPU’s frame buffer must be mirrored, applications can utilize only 1GB of video memory.

Read on for the rest of the review!

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