The wait is over, Far Cry 3 is here and available on the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and of course our favorite gaming platform, the PC. To kick things off on a high note, both AMD and Nvidia have released new GPU drivers -- AMD Catalyst 12.11 Beta and Nvidia GeForce 310.70 -- that promise to deliver big performance gains in Far Cry 3 (by as much as 38 percent in some cases), as well as a few other titles.

Jon Peddie Research (JPR) released GPU shipment statistics for the third quarter of 2012, and while the numbers were all over the map, it was mostly good news for Nvidia (more on that in a moment). Discrete GPU shipments held steady at 34.3 million units, up 4.5 percent sequentially but down 5.2 percent compared to the same quarter one year ago. There was also a 4.5 percent dip in overall graphics shipments in Q3 compared to last year, JPR says.

Summer might be coming to an end in the coming weeks, but the GPU price wars between AMD and Nvidia are just starting to heat up. To wit, AMD rolled out a series of price reductions in July for its Radeon HD 7970, 7950, and 7870 graphics cards, and now that Nvidia has made Kepler affordable with its GeForce GTX 660 Ti part, AMD is once again responding in kind with another round of cuts.

Technology and Lindsay Lohan don't seem to have a lot in common, but like the oft troubled celebrity, technology seems to always age faster than anyone thought possible. In a sense, there's no such thing as future proofing. We bring this up because a pair of popular mid-range graphics cards from yesterday -- Nvidia' GeForce GTX 560 and 550 parts -- are on the verge of becoming obsolete tomorrow.