MSI today unveiled
Nvidia's bread and butter has always been discrete GPUs. Even after giving up some ground to AMD in the first quarter of 2011, Nvidia still holds the top spot in discrete graphics market share with a dominating 59.12 percent of the pie, a healthy lead over AMD at 40.46 percent, according to data by Jon Peddie Research (see AMD's market share comments after the break). By 2015, however, mobile chips will be Nvidia's biggest money maker.
There's a new version of GPU-Z available for download (version 0.5.5) that now fully recognizes AMD A-Series Fusion processors. In addition, the latest build adds support for numerous videocards not previously recognized, fixes a shader count detection issue for Blackcomb (mobile AMD Cayman), adds a PowerColor hardware giveaway, and more.
Intel's all-in with its Sandy Bridge platform, and AMD would rather talk about its Accelerated Processing Units (APUs) than anything else. And if you're building a rig for your mom and pop for Christmas (or Kwanzaa or Hanukkah or just in general), you're probably eying up one of these two platforms and won't consider a discrete GPU. Scenarios like this one might help explain why discrete GPU shipments are down.
Power users who like to live on the bleeding edge have been able to download Nvidia's GeForce 280.26 drivers in beta form for some time now. As for everyone else who owns an Nvidia graphics card? Your day has come. Nvidia's latest drivers, which put a heavy emphasis on 3D Vision support, are now WHQL certified and ready for mass consumption.
Fusion-io is a Utah-based firm specializing in (among other things) high speed storage, like the 
Maximum PC's blunt no-BS review policy may lead some folks to believe that we're a bunch of hardassed curmudgeons, but actually, we're big softies sometimes. We love cuddling up with a nice, warm graphics card, for example (assuming the proper cooling systems are in place, of course). And everyone enjoys a good open-source project. OpenGL combines the best of both worlds; awesome graphics backed by open-source standards. Today, the Khronos Group, the nonprofit organization in charge of OpenGL, gave the platform a boost with the release of the OpenGL 4.2 standard.
Jon Peddie Research (JPR), a market research and consulting firm for graphics and multimedia, said graphics chip shipments "did not behave according to past years with regard to seasonality," but in a good way for GPU makers. Graphics chips didn't back-sass or start hanging around the wrong crowd, and instead misbehaved by outright ignoring the unwritten law of seasonality that says graphics shipments are supposed to slow down in the second quarter.
AMD on Wednesday made available it's Catalyst 11.7 driver package for Radeon graphics card owners, and in doing so, the chip maker fixed a barrel full of issues, many of them related to Windows 7. AMD said the Catalyst 11.7 package addresses any and all quirks with mouse cursor lag, and if you've been experiencing system hangs on specific HDMI and DisplayPort displays using the previous driver package, 11.7 will fix that too.
cards that aren't long for this world, not when you have accelerated processing units (APUs) that are more than capable of pushing pixels around your screen. And don't go shedding any tears for low-end videocards, AMD says it's all for the best.
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