NVIDIA Message Board older than one year ago

#hardware When NVIDIA debuted video cards featuring its powerful Kepler architecture earlier this year, PC gamers around the world stood up and cheered. Then they got quiet when they realized their only options were the $500+ GTX 680 card or the GTX 690, packing dual-Kepler graphics processing units for around $1,000. More »

Nvidia has released an update to its famous Dawn technology demo, putting the exhaustively rendered fairy in an environment that's as lushly portrayed as the original character. This latest version for GTX cards features full DirectX 11 tesselation, with over four million triangles making up the vines and forest bark. Dawn's hair is also shown in much more detail: The original version had 1,700 strands that couldn't move, and this version realistically renders 40,000 strands of hair, reflecting light at various angles.

The fairy's skin is also updated with a feature called "sub-surface scattering," which allows light to enter a surface for a short distance, and then bounce out at a number of angles. This allows the skin to look more real, as opposed to glowy or translucent.

If you have the appropriate hardware and want to run the demo yourself, it's available for download from Nvidia right now. As Nvidia says in the official blog post, "let's hope games catch up to her real soon."

#dawn In 2002 NVIDIA released "Dawn", a high-end DirectX 9 tech demo featuring a beautiful forest fairy that captured the hearts and minds of PC gamers all over the world. That mystical creature looks even more gorgeous ten years later. More »

#nvidia Another day, another hack of a large online community, this time PC graphics specialists NVIDIA. The Taiwanese company's forums were hacked last week, with culprits making off with usernames, email addresses, public information in their profiles and "hashed passwords with random salt value". More »

#pc Colorful, a Chinese firm specialising in Nvidia cards, is bringing us this. The iGame GTX 680. It's ostensibly just a single GTX 680, currently Nvidia's flagship single-GPU card. But look at it. More »

#nvidia Linux mastermind Linus Torvalds gave a recent speech in Finland, and one of the members of the audience related a story about using a Nvidia graphics card with the Linux OS—rather, unsuccessfully using a Nvidia graphics card with Linux. More »

Clouds are fluffy. They can take the shape of just about anything, too: bunnies, cars, lion kings – you name it. Oh, and they block the sun, which has been known to beam horrific, disfiguring burns down from the sky. Yet, in spite of those rather admirable qualities, we hardly ever notice them unless they’re about to open fire (read: water) on our outdoor fun or belch out a couple tornadoes. The same, oddly enough, can be said of cloud gaming. I mean, the potential’s there for a total upheaval in terms of where and when we experience super high-end PC games. But “core” game communities happily ignore all of that until someone whips out their “The End Is Nigh” sign and starts waxing incoherently about how it’ll kill hardware-based gaming forever.

As is typically the case with these things, the truth will – in all likelihood – fall somewhere in the middle. Nvidia recently announced that it’s betting on cloud in a big way with its OnLive and Gaikai-approved GeForce Grid technology, and while that’s not inherently good or bad for PC gaming, it signals the beginning of change – perhaps even a fairly major one. I spoke with Nvidia general manager of cloud gaming Phil Eisler about why he thinks cloud’s set to become the biggest thing in PC gaming within five years – as well as how that stands to be equal parts very good and potentially quite bad.

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#speakuponkotaku Commenter Make.Sense is in the market for a new video card, but like many PC gamers out there doesn't know if he should go with an AMD, a NVIDIA card, or something from one of those other gaming video card companies that don't really exist. Trick is, he wants everyone to be nice and calm. Let's try our best! More »

#nvidia NVidia made a splash at the 2012 GPU Technology Conference (GTC) this week, with the announcement of their first virtual, cloud-based GPU. More »

#techspot After many months of talking up its latest architecture, Nvidia reclaimed the single-GPU performance crown with its GeForce GTX 680, which outpaced the Radeon HD 7970 by about 7% in our tests. Kepler's arrival forced AMD to slash prices across its Southern Islands lineup, including a $70 drop on the HD 7970, putting it at $479 or about 4% cheaper than the GTX 680's MSRP of $499. More »

Using words we don't quite understand, Nividia has announced a new platform that will conceivably make cloud gaming a much more viable prospect. The Geforce GRID platform features "dedicated ultra-low-latency streaming technology and cloud graphics software" and the company believes it will "fundamentally change the economics and experience of cloud gaming."

A single GRID unit houses two GPUs based on Nvidia's Kepler technology, which the company says are capable of maintaining eight separate game streams simultaneously, an attractive prospect for gaming service providers. Additionally, "fast streaming technology" will supposedly drop server latency to "as little as 10 milliseconds," which, as we understand it, is pretty fast. So fast that GRID could potentially stream very high-end games to virtually any device, from phone to TV to toaster. Furthermore, Nvidia is working with smart TV manufacturers to reduce ethernet input lag so that, in theory, Gaikai could have latency on par with a console connected via HDMI (or slightly lower latency, if you believe the graph above).

Of course, we'll have to wait and see how everything works out in practice, but the possibilities are, in a word, crazypants.

#nvidia Nvidia president and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang took this stage this weekend at the GeForce LAN Shanghai to introduce the GeForce GTX 690, a dual-GPU monster designed from the ground up to be the most powerful video card in history. Are your nipples hard too? More »

#pc Capping off Nvidia's tease from earlier in the week, the company has taken the wraps off the GeForce GTX 690, which will be out on May 3. Price? Oh, a mere $999. More »

#nvidia It's coming, everybody. Nvidia's GeForce Facebook page updated this morning to ensure fans of the video card line knew that. And now you know. Don't thank me. More »

Do you care about anti-aliasing? Do you dream of snuggling up to its sort of crisp edges and mild performance hit? Or are jaggies an acceptable compromise in the name of RAW INCREDIBLE SPEED SPEED? It’s one of those things I find it increasingly hard to go without (though not as much as anisotropic filtering, missus) yet it’s always the first thing to go if a game’s not running so well on my ageing PC. Also, so many games don’t include a decent/any option for it in their settings, requiring me to have a fiddle in driver settings with variable results. Both NVIDIA and AMD are trying to change that, with newer anti-aliasing tech and the option to force it on globally in driver settings.(more…)

Play vidyagames, get real stuff for vidyagames: That's how the EVE Online PLEX-for-graphics-cards thing works. Good night, everyone!

OK, fine, in more detail this time: CCP Games, the developer behind EVE Online, has struck a deal with Nvidia for players to use in-game currency -- PLEX -- to purchase GeForce 560 GTX graphics cards, which run almost $200 at retail. That's fake money for real items, folks. Nvidia and CCP will start by selling 100 graphics cards (limit one per EVE account) to test the demand. After CCP announced its Nvidia deal, the in-game price of PLEX jumped "significantly," CCP said.

PLEX (Pilot License Extension) is an in-game currency that can be used to pay for 30-day EVE subscriptions. PLEX can be purchased with ISK, EVE's main currency that can be earned throughout the game, meaning some dedicated players end up with a free subscription each month. Now they may end up with a "free" graphics card as well.

You’re probably going to have be a little patient with me here. I used to talk of graphics cards and processors regularly back in my past life on PC Format magazine, but my technical mojo has diminished sharply in the intervening years. I retain a working knowledge of what’s half-decent and what’s a big pile of donkey doo-doo, but if you want me to talk dirty numbers to you, you’re going to be disappointed. It does seem jolly good, and I know that I want one in my PC, but I am no Jeremy Laird and RPS has not enjoyed a review unit with which to test NVIDIA’s claims in full. So, in reporting the news and details on NVIDIA’s new flagship graphics card, formerly known as Kepler but to be released as the GeForce GTX 680, I shall have to report what I was told and leave you to draw your own conclusions.(more…)

The realm of PC gaming is terrifying and expensive, and our clumsy hands can't be trusted around anything more fragile than a dual shock. As a result, we generally leave the technical, delicate heavy lifting of PC hardware analysis to our compatriots at Engadget, who are much more coordinated and far less hot-pocket stained than us.

Nvidia's newest graphics card, the GTX 680, is claimed to be the "fastest GPU in the world." It features an automatically variable clockspeed that maxes out GPU speed based on heat, "Adaptive VSync technology" for governing rendering speeds in sync with your monitor's refresh rate, and a new "TXAA" anti-aliasing algorithm, which we desperately hope stands for "Turbo Xtreme Anti-Aliasing." Head over to Engadget for its complete breakdown of the card's intricacies. It's even got charts and graphs!

#nvidia This video is described as (and almost certainly is) the launch video for Nvidia's new GPU, the GTX680, leaked ahead of schedule. More »

#originpc 3D technology loves dual video cards, but gaming laptop manufacturers tend to shy away from dropping a pair of NVIDIA mobile cards in their machines. Something about keeping down cost. As I've demonstrated in the past, Origin PC isn't a company that shies away from making a really expensive product, especially when it gets them a 'first' achievement. More »

Hello, good morrow and, well, graphics. After my début – and let’s be honest, definitive – dissertation on PC processors last month, this time around we’re talking pixel pumpers. The bad news is that this instalment won’t be nearly as neat as the first. With CPUs, I can point at the Intel Core i5 2500K and bark, “buy it”. Job done. Things are a lot more fluid and complex when it comes to GPUs – but even so, when it comes down to it you only need to trouble yourself with four cards today. The buying decision remains rather easy.(more…)

#ces2012 When it comes to sim gamers, nothing is too expensive or too out of the ordinary. They will pay any price to have an experience that is as close to the real thing as possible. Meet the VRX iMotion. Nvidia was showing this bad boy off at their booth at CES this year, so I just had to give it a whirl. More »

#takeitontherun This past week at CES, Nvidia and ASUS teamed up to show off The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim running on ASUS' latest and greatest tablet - the Transformer Prime. More »

#nvidia You've heard of flops, a.k.a floating point operations per second, before in video game circles. Who can forget the riveting moment in former Sony exec Ken Kutaragi's 2005 E3 PS3 presentation when he talked about how many gigaflops the system's processors would be capable of? Boring tech presentations aside, flops are great indicators of computing power. Today's consoles sit in the gigaflop range but, according to Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, they'll get exponentially more powerful in less than a decade. More »

#asuseeetransformerprime Having spent an extensive amount of time playing games on a dual core Tegra 2 Android tablet, I can only imagine how much better gaming must be on the new quad core Tegra 3-powered Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime. Why? Because I don't have one. Joanna Stern at The Verge does, however, so we'll let her tell us how it games. More »

#battlefield One thing that's becoming clear from the reviews coming in about Battlefield 3 is that a person's satisfaction might vary greatly depending on whether you play it on console or PC. If you want to experience the make-your-eyes-tear-up peak experience supposedly offered by DICE's Frostbite 2 engine but don't know where to start, then Nvidia's got a super-helpful breakdown on their GEForce website. The GPU manufacturer runs down configurations of various parts from its product lines as they'd integrate with a variety of motherboards, HDDs and RAM options. There's a few different price ranges, so you may not have to hurt your wallet too much to run EA's latest shooter in all its glory. More »

We may have to wait until the eighteenth of November to get our WASD-lovin' keyboard claws on the PC version of Batman: Arkham City, but the extra weeks have given us ample time to make sure our beefy rigs are up to snuff.

Not that we're that worried, mind you: Nvidia has released the minimum and recommended system requirements for the caped crusader's latest romp (after the break), and all told the spec aren't totally outrageous. Maybe we didn't need to spend forty thousand dollars on a replica of Batman: The Animated Series' Batcave supercomputer after all.

#batman ! While console players are busy exploring everything Batman: Arkham City has to offer, PC gamers have to wait until November 15 to don the cape and cowl. NVIDIA gives them something to look forward to with a video showing off how PhysX makes with the dust and clutter. More »

#rage The idea from the start was a game that blurred the lines between how games looked on console and PC. More »

#rage The computer version of Rage hasn't exactly been trouble free for some folks trying to play id Software's latest creation. I haven't run into any over issues, but I've got a high-end tower that I just ran through a massive driver update. That's not the norm. More »