We’ve seen more than a few Core i5 notebooks recently, all of which have been hamstrung by Intel’s weak integrated graphics. Now, Nvidia’s Optimus enables their discrete GPUs to work in current-generation Intel PCs, whether Intel likes it or not.
A year after Nvidia’s monstrous GeForce 200 series graphics cards first stomped onto the scene (literally the biggest GPUs ever), Nvidia’s finished making them mobile, delivering double the performance of current 9M series using half the power.
No, I didn’t stutter: GPGPU—general-purpose computing on graphics processor units—is what’s going to bring hot screaming gaming GPUs to the mainstream, with Windows 7 and Snow Leopard. Finally, everbody’s face melts! Here’s how.
This is all too familiar. The Apple support forums are lit up by complaints that the new 17-inch MacBook Pros are plagued by faulty Nvidia GeForce 9600 graphics cards.
Tired of ATI ruling the uberidiculous end of the graphics card space, Nvidia is apparently striking back with its own super-stacked GTX295—it’s basically two GTX 200 GPUs hot-glued together.
Digitimes says that Nvidia is bringing its GeForce 9400m chipset (from the new MacBooks) to Atom-based netbooks, which would markedly boost graphics performance. Netbooks that don’t totally bite balls performance-wise, holee crap. [Digitimes]
ATI has been hitting Nvidia hard with its 4000-series big guns like the Radeon HD 4870 X2, and they’re starting to feel it, with ATI successfully clawing away marketshare from Nvidia. Which has Nvidia skurred. So, sources say, Nvidia’s readying a barrage of price cuts to keep the territory loss to a minimum. If it pans out, we should be in for some sweet deals—last time Nvidia played hard ball with ATI, they threw bricks, cutting their top-end graphics cards by $US200 just a month out the gate, and let loose its GeForce 9800 GTX for around $US200 as well. It could be a Merry Christmas after all. [Digitimes via Maximum PC]
Really Nvidia, what the hell? After steadfastly arguing that its defective graphics cards were limited to notebooks only—they’ve even sent me a lovely email or two reiterating that claim—HP has just confirmed that 38 different desktop models are plagued with faulty Nvidia graphics cards.
