In the wake of global economic recession, standing still is not the way out of the woods. Thus, AMD GPG is getting ready to launch 40nm refreshes of their Radeon 4600 and 4800. We haven’t received confirmation about names of the products, but the naming should be Radeon 4700 and Radeon 4900 series, with 5800 series reserved for the DirectX 11 part. Of course, AMD might be inclined to change the name and advance to 5000 series immediately, but we’ll see. RV740 and RV790 should be considered as a trial run for TSMC’s 40nm process, currently “the most advanced manufacturing process” on Earth. Yes, it
New Steam survey confirms Intel, Nvidia dominate the market share
Developing a game and want to know what gamers use? Valve Corporation gathered more than 15 million users of their Steam digital distribution platform, but probably the most interesting part is world famous “Steam Hardware Survey”. How many people use high-end hardware? What kind of displays do gamers use? We analyze last last six months…
nForce is dead: Zotac releases its GeForce 9300 motherboard
I saw first motherboards based on MCP7-series chipset back on Computex 2007. Yup, after a year and half nVIDIA is finally releasing MCP7 series to market, featuring GeForce 8-class GPU for Intel processors. It is hard to understand what kind of problems delayed this part for over a year, but one of theories could be that nVIDIA didn’t want to cannibalize the sales of GeForce 8400 and 8500 series, which is give-or-take the performance that you’re going to get with GeForce 9300/9400 chipset. Zotac is well known manufacturer of nVIDIA graphics cards, and also known as the company that produced highest clocked 8800Ultra, 8800GT and
Sparkle’s excellent idea: Cheap PCI Express x1 cards
One of more interesting niche markets is the one named “how to fix the computer crippled with integrated graphics?”, and the solutions that are being sold in that area. We saw interesting products coming from Albatron, Sparkle, MSI and others, but it is a rare occasion to see a card in sub-$50 range that offers DX10 support. The company released a series of PCIe x1 cards for those unlucky owners of motherboards without PCI Express x16 slot. Sparkle released no less than eight models based on GeForce 8400GS graphics chip. Sadly, memory controller is limited to 64-bit, but this was Nvidia’s doing. Memory is either
