AMD might be in for a dogfight when Nvidia's Kepler architecture leaves the porch. Early reports suggest Nvidia has a real winner on its hands and that Kepler is such a strong performer, even Nvidia's mid-range cards will give AMD's high-end GPUs a run for their money. The information available is vague and scattered, but it all points to Nvidia stealing back the performance crown.

The world of technology is really a series of chess matches between various rivals, each one making moves based on a playing board created by the other, all in an attempt to gain an edge and, if possible, declare checkmate (without running afoul of antitrust laws, of course). Two of the bigger participants are AMD and Nvidia, and to counter AMD's recent Radeon HD 7000 series launch, Nvidia may opt to release its upcoming GeForce GTX 680 graphics card a month early.

For those of you who prefer not to roll your own gaming machines and would rather have a boutique system builder do it for your, Maingear, based out of New Jersey, announced it has begun equipping its Shift and F131 rigs with AMD's new Radeon HD 7950 and 7970 graphics cards (check out our performance preview of the 7970 here), and will soon be offering them in its Vybe series.

Is anyone still playing Rage anymore? It's a fun game overall, albeit a short excursion into a bug-ridden landscape that desperately needs to be fleshed out. It's also been eclipsed by newer titles, like Skyrim, Battlefield 3, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Batman: Arkham City, and other recent titles. But hey, if you're still rocking Rage and own an AMD Radeon HD graphics card, there's a new preview driver available that's supposed to further smooth out game play.