Is Nvidia losing its grip?

Monday, June 30th, 2008

Today sees a very telling announcement in the graphics world. Gainward, for years an exclusive producer of mainstream and overclocked GeForce cards, has launched its first Radeons to market – the HD 4850 and HD 4870.

You could look at it one of two ways. The simplest reason could be that Gainward (owned by non-exclusive card maker, Palit) simply wants to boost its profits by reaching a larger audience than it previously sold to. The other is that AMD’s current resurgence has Gainward looking upon Nvidia as less of a sure thing than before.

After all, each of Nvidia’s last few launches has seen the GeForces getting faster, but also bigger and hotter than ever before, while AMD is managing to keep up in the speed race while keeping its Radeons much more manageable, and vastly less expensive.

It’ll be interesting to see if any other manufacturers follow suit.

Just in: ATI Radeon HD 4870

Friday, June 27th, 2008

This is the ATI Radeon HD 4870, rumoured before its release to be one of the fastest cards around, and it has just landed in our labs, only one week after it was announced.

It’s benchmarking downstairs in our labs as we speak – hence the odd angle in the image above – but we can already tell you that it looks to be incredible value for money.

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The calm before the Brawl

Thursday, June 26th, 2008

The likes of David Bayon and Mike Jennings can keep their PS3s and their GTA IVs. Me, I’m much more excited about tomorrow’s UK release of Super Smash Bros Brawl (SSBB to its friends).

Excited — but also apprehensive, because, let’s face it, Nintendo doesn’t exactly have a great record on stock availability. My experience of actually using the Wii has been entirely positive; but buying it, and then buying games and accessories for it, has involved a surprising amount of anxiously standing in queues at stupid times of the morning. Because if you miss the first shipment of games/controllers/consoles, you may not have another chance to buy the thing you want for weeks or even months.

(Yes, I know I should pre-order. I tried that with the Wii console itself and all I got was an email the day before launch saying they didn’t have enough stock. Shut up.) (more…)

Three: Definitely a Crowd.

Friday, May 2nd, 2008

You may have seen a while ago that we examined a new chunk of hardware that – and this may be something of a blessing – will never make it to retail: the Asus EAH3850 X3 Trinity.

We were surprised and, dare we say it, a little impressed: Asus packed three 3850 chipsets onto one PCB and, remarkably, made it work. With water cooling and enough electricity to power Bill Gates’ cash machine – almost 300W for the card on its own, in fact. It didn’t really increase frame-rates much when compared to a single 512MB HD 3850 – adding 3fps to our high benchmark in Crysis – but it was certainly an interesting experiment.

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