Barring any last minute surprises, Nintendo will be the first of the big three console makers to come out with a next generation living room game system. It's the Wii U, and it will ship with HD graphics support, a funky new tablet controller, and updated guts that, in theory, should have developers excited. It is, after all, a new toy to play with. So why are a handful of developers dissing the Wii U?
If you've dropped the dough on a spiffy new enthusiast-level Sandy Bridge-E processor, you may decide to drop a corresponding level of dough on a spiffy new enthusiast-level Nvidia HTX 680 graphics card. (If so, we salute your Maximum-ness.) There's just one little caveat you should be aware of, however; Nvidia's initial WHQL drivers for the GTX 680 nerfs data transfer levels to slower PCI-E 2.0 speeds, rather than the blazing fast enthusiast-level PCI-E 3.0 x16 speeds the X79 chipset is capable of.
If those spiffy new Kepler-based GTX 680 graphics cards do in fact end up hitting the streets tomorrow, as has been widely rumored, enterprising overclockers will no doubt be looking to tweak their new hardware to even higher levels of performance. Boosting core frequencies should be a cinch for owners of MSI-brand GTX 680s; the company joined forces with Guru3D to release a new Beta version of its Afterburner overclocking utility, complete with support for Kepler GPUs.
Want to know all the deep, dirty and highly technical details about your graphics card that the Windows Experience Index refuses to share with you? Hardcore system tweakers have been turning to TechPowerUp's GPU-Z for just that kind of info for a while now, and today the application got a fresh new coat of paint. GPU-Z v0.6.0 adds, amongst other things, support for many of the new Radeon 7000 hitting the streets -- and support for GTX 600 cards that will supposedly be hitting the streets soon. (Maybe even this week?)
Another day, another pair of new AMD Radeon HD graphics cards. Didn't we just say that yesterday? In another fine example of how quickly things move in today's age, several companies unleashed a smorgasbord of new AMD Radeon cards today and made our previous statements obsolete. How many cards constitute a smorgasbord? Seven, by our count, and the good news is that most of the new releases are higher-end models.
If you caught any of the coverage of Apple's iPad launch event yesterday -- and you couldn't have missed it unless you boycotted Facebook, Twitter, Google+, tech sites, and the Internet in general -- then you would have seen the Cupertino company puff out its chest as it talked about the new iPad's A5X processor, a mighty chip with supposedly four times the graphics performance of Nvidia's Tegra 3 processor. There's only one problem with that: Apple's scrumptious claim was served up without a side of benchmarks.
Microsoft wasn't the only company releasing Windows 8 Consumer Preview software yesterday. If you're rocking a Radeon graphics card, you'll be happy to hear that AMD rolled out new Catalyst drivers specifically tailored for the prerelease OS, complete with support for Windows 8's WDDM 1.2 features.
If your AMD-based build keeps getting all hot and bothered, your rampant "incognito mode" Chrome browsing isn't to blame -- you've probably got a problem with thermals. Pouring a bucket of ice cold water over your PC isn't recommended, but that's not to say that a little aqua can't help cool things down. PowerColor just announced what it claims is the first Radeon HD 7970 with a liquid cooling waterblock built right onto the card.
Good news if you're the proud owner of a Nvidia GeForce graphics card: after a flood of beta drivers, the first WHQL-certified drivers from the Release 295 family are ready to roll. Nvidia promises that the 295.73 WHQL drivers pack in all the upgrades found in the recent beta drivers, "plus a few other treats." Every GeForce card ever released looks to be supported.
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