Damn, when I first heard about the GeForce 260 and 280 I thought it was checkmate. No one expected much of the new line of Radeons in the first place given ATI’s lackluster offerings lately, and combine that with the improvement in the 65nm 280 — I think I was justified in thinking so. But the Radeon 4850 came out a little later and jaws dropped. It offered nearly the performance of the 260, and at a huge discount. Now the 4870 has dropped and it nearly tops the 280, at half the price.

NVIDIA is taking evasive action, but to be honest it may be too late for this gamer. I switched over to a GeForce in my last system build, but if ATI is able to pull this kind of performance out of this chipset for such an incredible price, I may swing the other way next time I’m window-shopping at Newegg.

Or maybe over the next week or so. With the release of the ATI HD 4850 and NVIDIA’s new 55nm-based 9800GTX+, the price/performance ratio is really nice right now. Of course, as with all components, the longer you wait, the better the deal is, but if you’re looking for an upgrade right now, these new releases will drop quite a few prices across the board.

The 4850 is available for less than $200 right now, and the upcoming release of the 9800GTX+ will make the prices for the non-”+” versions of the card drop to around that point as well. Of course, if you’re willing to shell out an extra $30 (and I recommend it), the + version should be faster and coolerbut probably not cooler.

Well, it’s not exactly standardization, it’s more a simplification of all the insane model numbers, product lines, and motherboard configurations that go into a serious gaming PC. Since gaming is getting more and more traction among non-gamers, it follows that many technically inexperienced people will be looking at a lot of kit and trying to figure out what it all means. Imagine being a mom trying to surprise your kids with a nice new rig and seeing this on the tag: “MSI NX8800GTS 320M OC GeForce 8800GTS 320MB 320-bit GDDR3 PCI Express x16 HDCP SLI”

Now I know what all that means (kind of), but she doesn’t, and she’d probably rather see something that says “Yes. This plays all the games out there pretty decently.” AMD is aiming to make this happen by standardizing a few setups and creating a straightforward badging system that even a n00b can understand. There will be “GAME!” and “GAME! Ultra,” both aiming to keep a steady 30fps in most games on the market at autodetect settings. Click below for more details.
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Phil Hester, who joined AMD only three years ago in 2005, has resigned as AMD’s CTO. However, AMD is claiming that they have no plans to replace him. It is likely that someone else within the company will take over his duties though, as a company such as this cannot really function without a CTO.

Hester was working on an effort called “accelerated computing” while at AMD. This is an effort to use specific circuitry on semiconductors in conjunction with mainstream processors to increase computing performance.

Hester is apparently leaving to pursue other opportunities, and has made no announcements about post-AMD plans. No official word on whether he left due to the threat of collateral damage from rival Nvidia’s CEO Jen-Hsun Huang opening a can of whoop-ass.

What is it with ATI and stuttering? When Half-Life 2 was released, the game was totally unplayable on my rig (With a Radeon 9600 Pro, no slouch at the time) and pretty much everyone else’s due to constant and crippling stuttering and the still-dangerous audio-loop crash. The game was allegedly designed with almost my exact hardware configuration in mind, yet it was totally busted (didn’t stop me from playing through it, slowly).

Well, lately they’ve had trouble like that with other games, like TimeShift, as I’m sure you know very well if you have one the games affected. Fortunately, they’ve released a hotfix for it which should resolve the problem. Nice job, ATI, but is it too much to ask to not have these game-killing bugs in the first place?

Interesting. I’m not sure why they went with three instead of the obvious four, but this single card sports two R670 cores on the back and one on the front. That’s the core of ATi’s last generation of 3800s, so it’s at least as powerful as a 3870 X2, which is a viable retail product.

They call it the Trinity, which is okay I guess, but has uncomfortable Matrix implications. I’d go with “Cerberus” — three heads, lots of power, it’s perfect.

Exclusive: ASUS EAH3850 Trinity – three GPUs with one card [Nordic Hardware]

It’s not exactly world-shattering news, but it is nice to know what in the future I’m not going to be saddled with triple-DVI connections for my 2K monitor. Radeon’s 3000 series and their 780G integrated graphics chipset are the first to be fully DisplayPort-certified.The DisplayPort interface pushes twice as much information as DVI, so not only could that open doors for some kind of daisy-chaining of monitors for dual display setups (already possible? I’m not a dual-display guy) but it could allow for some really high-res monitors, technology allowing.

Editing truly hi-def video is a pain not only because of the processing time involved, but because you’re always working with reduced or cropped video because the resolution of the screen is limiting. With higher bandwidth and advances in LCD technology, consumer-accessible displays could be pushing 2000 vertical pixels soon.

AMD Receives First Ever DisplayPort™ Certification for PC Graphics

Check it out: I saw this X1950, which was one of the last and best DirectX 9 cards, featured on Tom’s Hardware’s Best Gaming Cards for the Money feature. They said they had it at Newegg for $89, but Newegg has removed that deal. Fortunately, a relatively reputable dealer has a similar deal. This is a steal of a price, you would normally be paying around $175 for one of these things. This is probably the best value you can get for the dollar right now; it’s got great performance and no games that really need DirectX 10 will run on anything less than a GeForce 8800GTS anyway.

Jetway Radeon X1950 Pro

We’d heard that the new MacBook Pros that launched today were going to feature new ATI GPUs, but here we are, they’re launched, and they feature NVIDIA GeForce chipsets instead. Or that should be “still”, as that’s what the MacBook Pros have had standard all along.

Video editors in particular want ATI, but Apple keeps going with NVIDIA. What gives?

Looks like Radeons are competitive again. For a whole year, ATI and their owner/partner AMD have lagged behind the industry leaders NVIDIA and Intel in GPU and CPU performance. Well, it looks like ATI has finally managed to come out on top (again), although it’s entirely possible that their competitors will drop something hot in the next few weeks as well.

The 3800 series is their high-end graphics card series, and the HD 3870 X2 is the dual-GPU’d beast they engineered to do battle with the 8800 Ultra. Tom’s Hardware, whom I trust in these things, has it beating the 8800 by 7%, while costing about $250 less ($450 vs $700 street prices). That’s a triumph, and even if NVIDIA does paste two cards together too, the cost would be prohibitive. Add in the hardware HD decoder and you’ve got a sweet deal, although you might not be able to hear the movie over the sound of the fan working overtime to cool two GPUs. And 66 frames per second in Call of Duty 4 at 1920×1200? Yes, please!

Product Page

Just don’t try to play any games with it. I thought this was worth mentioning since people have complained of the cost of DX10 cards. Well, now you can get one for 50 clams. Of course, for that amount of cash you’re probably getting 64 megs of RAM (they don’t specify), which is almost enough to run Daikatana. But if you’ve got it set up right, you’ll be getting hardware processing of your HD DVD and Blu-Ray movies. This is probably a good graphics card for your mom, or at least until she gets that 8800GTX I ordered her for Valentine’s day. Sorry the pic is watermarked, Tom’s Hardware got the exclusive shots on this one (the passive-cooling 3450 to be precise).

Press Release at AMD

Listen up, gamers. Normally this is Devin’s territory, but seeing as he’s still in the clink following a disastrous run in with Johnny Law after a few too many glasses of PowerNog™, it falls on my to cover this today.

Also, my German isn’t so hot, so I’m trying to translate this with Google and getting nowhere. But here’s the gist of it: new Radeons are coming from ATI, and they seem pretty hot.

There are three of them, and they are: The HD3450, a RV620-based, VGA + Display Port, 256MB, 525Mhz PCIe card; the 3470, also based on the RV620, but featuring DVI + VGA + S-Video out, and a 600Mhz clock with 256 or 512MB of RAM; and the HD3650, based on the RV635 running at 600 or 800Mhz, 256 or 512MB RAM, and dual DVI or S-Video out.

These are pretty good specs for mid-range cards, we expect to see more of them at CES coming up in a few weeks here. So stay tuned, game nerds!

Photos and full specs, not in English, apparently in Italian or something [MadBoxPC]

AMD’s newly-announced FireStream technology was announced earlier today and is being touted as the first of its kind to contain a double-precision floating point. The technology is based on ATI’s Radeon graphics card line and the new chips will cost $2000 a pop.

The floating point, as you’ll remember from gradeschool, “is a numerical-representation system in which a string of digits (or bits) represents a real number,” according to Wikipedia. In plain English, this new chip is “modified to crunch huge amounts of data, with potential customers in financial, engineering, and scientific industries.”

AMD taps graphics chip for data-crunching [Reuters]

Now that GPU manufacturers are touting their ability to tackle high-def content, it’s a good idea to investigate exactly which GPUs you should spend your money on. The two main camps, nVidia and ATI/AMD, both have several GPUs on the market, at several different price points, so choosing one is quite a hassle. Thankfully, AnandTech put several GPUs to the test, seeing how they fared in various videophile-geared tests and seeing how they worked with various CPU configurations. It’s actually disgustingly thorough and unless you’re really into PC-based high-def watching, you’ll probably have no idea what’s going on.

If there’s a one-line summary, it’s this: choose a GPU that gives you options. The ATI/AMD GPUs are designed in such a way that the end user has no control of settings like noise reduction and how much should be applied to an image. Conversely, nVidia lets you fiddle away with setting after setting. That matters for video freaks; normal people can probably pass right by “Go.” Another point, though it’s not exactly a state secret: if you plan on watching high-def content on your PC, don’t be a tightwad and choose a “value” card. These cards are complete rubbish as far as high-def goes.

HD Video Decode Quality and Performance Summer ‘07 [AnandTech]

PC Gamers will always find a way to justify buying the latest, greatest card on the market. ATI and nVidia know this, which is why they keep releasing cards on a weekly basis. ATI’s latest offerings include the Radeon 2400 HD and 2600 HD. Both cards will be available at fine retailers online and off.

Both GPUs feature AMD’s Unified Video Decoder technology, which lessens the load on your PC’s CPU and dumps the processes onto the GPU. HD movies and video will benefit the most from this, including Blu-ray and HD-DVD. Both cards will also be DirectX 10 compatible. No price has been set, but since these cards aren’t top-of-the-line, don’t expect to pay over $200.

AMD announces it has begun shipping Radeon HD 2400 and 2600 GPUs to customers [TGDaily]

Lots of reference designs coming out of Taipei this week at Computex. Adding to that list is CoolIT Systems‘ factory-sealed, maintenance-free liquid-cooling system for AMD’s ATI Crossfire (no, not that Crossfire) configuration for the new high-performance Radeon HD 2900 XT graphic card.

The assembly uses “micro-channel technology in a closed loop liquid-cooling design” that reduces the ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT graphics card to a single PCIe slot size. And with newer motherboard designs showing up with four, x16 PCIe slots, you’d be able to run four cards without worrying about heat or fan noise.

The cooling unit itself slides into two, standard 5.25-inch drive bays, meaning anybody with a philips-head screwdriver and two open bays can install this thing. If you’re into building extremely powerful gaming PCs, you’ll want to consider CoolIT’s solutions. Hit the jump to watch a video of the company using the reference design to overclock the crap out of the new AMD GPUs.

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Nothing beats free stuff. Whether it’s a free ice cream cone or a free iPod, both are just so, so sweet. Those of you who still shell out $1000 a year to upgrade your PC for games will be happy to know that Valve and ATI have struck a bit of a deal that runs in your favor. Owners of ATI RadeonT graphics cards will be able to download free games from Valve’s Steam service.

So you have a RadeonT card and want to get your download on? Right now, you can get Half-Life 2: Lost Coast and Half-Life 2: Deathmatch via Steam for the cost of absolutely nothing. Steam will also be packaged with ATI graphics cards from now until 2008. Sounds like a good deal. You can get the full nitty gritty by visiting this site.

Free Steam games for all ATI Radeon card users [Strategy Informer]

ATI Radeon X2800XT with CrossFire rumored for Apple’s next Mac Pro [Apple Insider]

ATI Radeon X1900 G5 Mac Edition [product page]

Radeon X1950 Pro: The Evolution of CrossFire [ExtremeTech]