A graphics card can cost you almost as much as a bona fide Batman gadget, especially when you get up to ridiculous amounts of power and performance, but that ludicrous price is actually less ludicrous than it could be, because of the cutthroat competition between ATI and Nvidia, right? Not so fast. An email Nvidia sent by Nvidia senior VP of marketing, Dan Vivoli, to ATI's president and COO, Dave Orton made public by the judge in an ongoing anti-trust suit against the two companies reveals that they both see eye-to-eye on prices. Namely, that they should be higher:

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AMD CEO Hector Ruiz is out the door. While he drove their burly competition with Intel, he's also responsible for AMD's poor acquisition of ATI and its lagging financials of late. Taking over is Dirk Meyers, who's more chip geek than businessman. Maybe that's what they need. [Cnet]

ATI fanboys, your time may have come with the R700-based Radeon HD 4870 X2. It's a US$500 multi-GPU card that basically straps together a pair of Radeon HD 4870s with 2GB of onboard memory to create ATI's fastest single card ever. (It's not your imagination, they're really stepping with the Nvidia-killing, which is sweet.) Benchwise, it actually beats Nvidia's monster GeForce GTX 280 running in SLI in a couple of games, like Age of Conan.

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Nvidia's top end GeForce GTX 260 and 280 graphics cards--whose power borders on sorcery--launched for US$399 and US$650, respectively, less than a month ago. But pressure from ATI has driven Nvidia to already cut the price, hard. The GTX 280 is now only US$399, while the GTX 260 is US$299, the same price as ATI's HD 4870. Good to see ATI back in the fight. Anyone already buy this and feel hosed though? Competition is a lovely thing. [CNET]

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Remember those modders from NGOHQ who were swolling out ATI's Radeon graphics cards with Nvidia's PhysX physics engine? Surprise, Nvidia loves the idea of their physics engine running on rival ATI's graphics cards, so they're giving Eran Badit and his crew total support, with access to documentation, SDKs, hardware and actual engineers. AMD, on the other hand, isn't being so cooperative.

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ATI's probably pretty mad Nvidia stole some of the excellent mid-range Radeon HD 4850's thunder by dropping the GeForce 9800 GTX+ for a mere US$30 more. So they're hitting back with a special Radeon HD 4800 card designed solely for the crushing of Nvidia's top-of-the-line GTX 280 graphics card in pure performance.

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In the battle for video card domination, dark horse Matrox never seemed to even come close to keeping up with Nvidia and ATI's crazy GPU arms race. But after fading almost completely from the gadgetsphere, the company has suddenly returned with the launch of five new graphics cards under its "M-Series" line. The M-Series targets the multi-display market and consists of two low-profile PCIe cards and three standard formate ATX PCIe cards.

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After Nvidia picked up PhysX, it was obvious ATI would probably get left out of Nvidia's efforts to spread the love to graphics cards and x86 CPUs (hence ATI hooking up with Havok). (Physics engines, for the uninitiated, are what make your body bounce around with aplomb after getting stuck with a grenade in Halo 3.) But some modders have fixed that and ported PhysX to ATI's Radeon 3800 cards, instantly improving benchmarks.

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The fashionable thing these days is to take the tremendous processing power of graphics cards and put them to use when you're not utilising them to render games. CyberLink, for one, has come up with a pretty ingenous method to take an ATI or NVIDIA card (in their case, the demo was on an ATI Radeon 4850 512MB card) and convert four 1080p MPEG-2 movies into MPEG-4. Simultaneously. As long as you've got a pretty fast video card, all you need is a copy of CyberLink PowerDirector 7 and you can be doing this too. We hope this is the kind of thing Apple's going to be putting into Snow Leopard. [TG Daily]

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Poised and waiting for ATI's latest graphics card to hit, Nvidia immediately fired off the 9800 GTX+, a nimbler version of its behemoth 9800 GTX, aggressively priced at US$229 to put serious pressure on the US$199 HD 4850. Benchmarks comparing the two weren't available yesterday, but PC Perspective has 'em up now. In short, while the HD 4850 can mostly keep up with Nvidia's older, regular 9800 GTX, the steroid-injected 9800 GTX+ has enough juice to edge it out in almost every single benchmark. The Radeon HD 4850 has about a month on the shelf to itself before the 9800 GTX+ hits though. Check out PC Perspective for more graphs and numbers than your brain wants to deal with on a Friday. [PC Perspective via Engadget]

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