The PC Report

While Nvidia hasn’t officially said anything about the mobile version of their new “Fermi” desktop graphics card counterparts, a product page from Eurocom shares some info on the mobile GPU. The GTX 480M is available as an option for three of Eurocom’s high-end notebooks and shares with us that the card will be packing 2GB of GDDR5 memory, DirectX 11 support, a 100W power specification and a similar 40nm die as seen in the desktop Fermis.

While the specs are all well and good, the price is not so much – it’ll cost you an extra US$380 on top of the stock 1GB ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5870. Whether or not the extra performance from the Nvidia card is worth the price mark-up has still yet to be seen. The GTX 480M won’t be available in laptops until June 2010 (I keep forgetting that it’s just next month) but Eurocom is still accepting orders for laptops with the Fermi GPU.

ATI is getting around to filling out the lower-end of their DirectX 11 compatible series with their latest release: the ATI Radeon HD 5670. The new card is made on the same 40nm process as its bigger brothers, carries either 1GB or 512MB GDDR5 RAM and is fully compatible with both DirectX 11 and ATI’s multi-monitor Eyefinity technology.

Performance wise, the HD 5670 is on-par with the performance of Nvidia’s GT 240 card, if not slightly better in real-world testing while using less power to boot. However, of course, this card isn’t really designed for gaming (being a lower-end 5000 series card) so don’t expect fantastic framerates in the latest games. But, for under US$100 you wont find a better card with the same wealth of features.

Nvidia’s DirectX 11 graphics card refresh was originally scheduled for a November 2009 launch, however due to manufacturing defects this was delayed to CES 2010. Now sources are saying that the GPU refresh wont occur until March of 2010, first with a GF100 card with a 40nm GPU and GDDR5 memory and followed by a GF104 card for the higher-end markets in Q2 2010.

Meanwhile, over in the ATI zone, ATI are planning to release some mid/low range DirectX 11 (Evergreen) cards to flesh out the lower areas of the 5000 series. We should be seeing a HD 5670 and HD 5450 as well as the leaked HD 5570 and HD 5350 cards launching sometime in January or February.

It’s got a long name, and it’s mighty powerful – the Acer Aspire 8942G-728G1280TWN is the first laptop to use DirectX 11 for next generation graphics. But it’s not only this that makes this laptop so good, it also packs a 1.6GHz Core i7 mobile processor, 8GB of DDR3 RAM and the latest ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5850 graphics to push out the DirectX 11 graphics with (hopefully) amazing frame rates.

The laptop also packs an 18-inch full HD (1920×1080) LED display, dual 640GB hard drives for excessive amounts of storage and an 8-cell battery that probably lasts just over 30 minutes while gaming. Oh, and it will kill your back carrying it; it weighs close to 4.6 kg. We have no idea when it will ship, apart from the “2010″ ballpark and the price is still unclear but it’ll be expensive. Really expensive.

If you’re one of the few Vista users who can stand the operating system enough to not upgrade to Windows 7, this news might interest you. DirectX 11, the new version of DirectX that comes with Windows 7 and should be implemented in upcoming games such as DiRT 2, is now available for Vista in a Platform Update. However, you won’t be able to install the update if you aren’t running Vista Service Pack 2.

It’s good to know that DX11 games will perform equally as well if your running Windows 7 or Vista. If you that desperately need DirectX 11, the update (KB971512) should be available now on Windows Update or via the Microsoft Download Center.