The PC Report

A few days ago we saw the release of the latest and greatest Nvidia GeForce drivers straight from the Nvidia labs with a WHQL certificate. The 258.96 drivers released on July 19 come with support for the new GeForce GTX 460 as well as Nvidia 3D Vision Surround if you have a capable set-up. Apart from those new features there are the usual bug fixes and game performance improvements, listed below in the release highlights.

As always, you can download the latest drivers for your Nvidia graphics card here, and we advise that you keep them updated so you can enjoy the best performance out of your GPU.

Read the rest of this entry »

It has been a while since we have been able to call an Nvidia card a “winner”, but today’s the day we see a true midrange winner with the Nvidia GeForce GTX 460. Basically the GTX 460 is one step down from the GeForce GTX 465 we saw a few months ago and is set to compete with the ATI Radeon HD 5830 which carries the same price tag. This is also the first Fermi graphics card that has launched with two, slightly different versions – a 1 GB version and a 768 MB version.

Today’s release has also seen a new core being used for the GPU. So far, the GTX 480, GTX 470 and GTX 465 have all used the Fermi GF100 core, however the new GTX 460 uses a different Fermi-based core known as the GF104. The GF104 core carries just 1.95 billion transistors compared to the 3 billion on the GF100 which helps keep prices down, power, size and temperatures down and also fairly moderate performance which brings it into the mid-range section of graphics cards.

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s that driver time of the month at Nvidia HQ and today marks the release of the 257.21 WHQL drivers for those with an Nvidia GeForce/ION GPU in their system. While the update is mainly to improve performance of the GTX 400 series cards (and also adding OpenGL 4.0 support for the cards), there are also a few other upgrades for non-400 series users. Check out the full list of new features below, and download the drivers from the usual spot.

Read the rest of this entry »

Just like we expected, Nvidia has released a card to fill out the lower-end of the Fermi enthusiast card section; one that will directly compete with the ATI Radeon HD 5850. The Nvidia GeForce GTX 465 is essentially the same card as the higher powered GTX 470, just with a few bits of the core disabled here and there to bring down the price point but also the power. In fact the card looks almost exactly the same as the GTX 470 – same length and same coolers.

The GeForce GTX 465 packs a 40 nm Nvidia Fermi GF-100 core on the inside, just dumbed down from the higher-end Fermi cards. The GTX 465 comes loaded with a core clocked at 607 MHz along with a shader of 1215 MHz (same as the GTX 470), 352 stream processors (down from the GTX 470′s 448) and 32 ROPS (compared to 40). Memory-wise the card comes loaded with 1 GB of GDDR5 video RAM clocked at 802 MHz on a 256-bit memory bus, which gives it a data rate of 3028 MHz.

Read the rest of this entry »

Shipping out in June is the new Fermi mobile iteration of the powerful Nvidia desktop graphics cards – the Nvidia GeForce GTX 480M. The new mobile GPU comes loaded with 352 CUDA cores, a 256-bit memory bus running up to 2 GB of GDDR5 memory at 1,200 MHz, and the graphics core runs at 425 MHz (around half the speed of the desktop GTX 480). Despite the low clockspeeds, the graphics card manages to pump out 897 gigaFLOPS from inside your laptop.

Alongside the release of this new chip are some new laptops from Eurocom. We’re seeing the Eurocom D900F Panther Mobile Workstation getting an upgrade to a single GTX 480M with 2GB of memory as well as the X8100 Leopard which is getting either GTX 480M SLI or HD 5870 CrossFireX in its 18.4″ display-packing body. The Eurocom Panther 2.0 should be getting a release in August and it’ll come packed with an Intel Core i7 processor up to 3.33 GHz, up to 24 GB of DDR3 RAM, up to 4 TB of storage over 4 drives, a 17.3″ 1080p display and the option of the new GTX 480M in SLI.

Full press release after the break. Read the rest of this entry »

This news is sure to disappoint a lot of buyers out there who bought either a Nvidia GeForce GTX 480 or GTX 470 and were waiting for the pure awesomeness of 3D gaming over three monitors. The Nvidia 3D Vision Surround technology that rivals ATI’s Eyefinity multiple monitor gaming solution has been delayed until the end of June. Nvidia fans were originally supposed to get this feature via a driver update sometime in April but this date has slipped, presumably due to technical issues getting three monitors pumping out 3D games together.

For now, if you desperately need a trio of monitors pumping out your games we suggest you look to a Evergreen-series ATI card, all of which come with the aforementioned Eyefinity technology.

We’ve reported on the next card to the GTX 400 series before, and today we’re getting some new details about the card. Supposedly the previously known GTX 460 has been renamed to the GeForce GTX 465 as Nvidia wants the 460 name for a lower powered GF104 card rather than a GF100 card like the GTX 470/480.

Specs still remain similar to the GTX 460 we saw before, with the card sporting 1 GB of GDDR5 memory clocked effectively at 3,206 MHz on a 256-bit memory interface. 352 stream processors will be present on the card along with a 607 MHz GPU with a 1,215 MHz shader clock – which happens to be the same as the GPU on the GTX 470. The card, tested by Chinese site eNet,  is apparently faster than an ATI Radeon HD 5870 during Far Cry 2, but is worse than a HD 5830 in Crysis Warhead.

The card is rumoured to be launching next month, with more details rolling out hopefully sometime around Computex in early June.

After Apple had shockingly implemented GPU switching into their most recent refresh of the Macbook Pro line-up, trust a user to come up with an easy fix that allows you to control the switching. Cody Krieger’s gfxCardStatus application has evolved quite rapidly from a utility that just showed which GPU was in use to a full blow utility that allows you to switch between the Intel HD Graphics on-board to the more powerful and more battery consuming Nvidia GeForce GT 330M at your will.

Everyone with a 2010 model Macbook Pro with the GT 330M should check out this handy utility, available now from Cody Krieger’s website. Some users say the application is a bit buggy, but we’ll leave it to you to decide whether to try it out or not.

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.

The latest WHQL drivers from Nvidia, 197.45, have just been released for all those with a Nvidia 6-series card and above – except the GTX 400 series who still have to use the 197.41 release. These new drivers bring support for OpenGL 4.0 for all graphics cards, adds support for the new GPU-accelerated features in Adobe CS5 products, adds MotionDSP’s videos software vReveal and several other bug fixes and improvements. As usual you can download the drivers from Nvidia here; check out the release notes below.

Read the rest of this entry »