Remember all the hoopla leading up to Nvidia's Fermi launch? We were teased with leaked photos, benchmarks, and several delays due to reported defects. Nvidia eventually ironed out whatever bugs it needed to in order to get Fermi to market in the form of a GTX 480, a fast videocard with a group of stream processors disabled. It also ran hot and a little bit loud, ultimately leading us to declare the the GTX 580 "the real Fermi" (see our review here). We're expecting a much smoother rollout to Fermi's successor, though it appears delays are still part of the game.

AMD isn't letting a silly little thing like market share ruin its summer. Rather than hide under a rock from failing to make a dent in Intel's stranglehold on the chip market, even after the initial Sandy Bridge snafu, AMD has come out swinging this month with its Llano A-series accelerated processing units (APUs). Earlier this month saw the launch of AMD's mobile Llano chips, and now the Santa Clara chip maker is announcing the availability of two Llano A-series APUs for the desktop.

Here's the thing about gaming on a laptop. In almost every case, the GPU isn't upgradeable, so if you plan on using your notebook to frag your friends, you better invest in a laptop with the fastest GPU you can afford. And if you're looking for the fastest mobile GPU on the planet, Nvidia claims its new GeForce GTX 580M with up to 384 CUDA cores and up to 2GB of 256-bit GDDR5 memory is it.

Don't expect Microsoft to endorse WebGL (Web-based Graphics Library), the Khronos Group's cross-platform, low-level 3D graphics API for the web. Though it's supported in Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome, and will be coming to future versions of Apple Safari and Opera, Microsoft is refusing to support WebGL in its current form because several security risks make it harmful, the Redmond software giant said.