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Filed under: Desktops

We know the past couple years haven’t been kind to VIA-owned S3 Graphics — market share has declined, and NVIDIA and ATI keep introducing fancy new technologies, making it tough to keep up. That said, we’re inspired by S3’s ardent attempts to stay relevant in an industry that won’t easily make room for small competitors. The latest case in point: the company has released a photo-editing app to demonstrate the newly-programmed GPGPU (general-purpose computing on graphics processing units) functionalities of its DirectX 10.1 Chrome 400 line of discrete graphics cards. S3 claims its hard work has produced an HPC environment that can be used to reduce processing time for scientific and other applications from days to seconds — we’ll believe it when we see it, but you’ve gotta admire the tenacity.

[Via CustomPC]

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Source: Samuel Axon

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Filed under: Gaming, Peripherals

It’s arriving a month later than anticipated, but at least it’s arriving (we hope). According to a first look at PhysX on NVIDIA’s GeForce cards, The Tech Report is reporting (ahem) that the graphical outfit will dish out new drivers that add PhysX support on August 12th. The new software will allow owners of GeForce 8, GeForce 9 and GeForce GTX 200-series cards to use PhysX acceleration without shelling out any additional coinage, which means that you all will surely be giving it a shot just for kicks, right? Keep next Tuesday clear — you and Unreal Tournament 3 have a date, like it or not.

[Via UberReview]

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Source: Darren Murph

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Filed under: Gaming, Peripherals

An external graphics card that’s actually nearing release? Be still our hearts! Fujitsu Siemens’ recently leaked external unit, which will be based on ATI XGP technology, is actually really, really close to hitting retail — according to a piece over at Fudzilla, anyway. Slated to be titled Lasso, the RV670-based device should be more than enough to handle basic tasks, but unfortunately, benchmarks were off limits. On the upside, digital photography was not, so head on down to the read link for a few more snaps.

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Source: Darren Murph

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AMD / ATI is bustin’ out with some new graphics cards for your gaming (or casual use) pleasure, and we’ve got details to share with you. The company has recently issued its Radeon HD 3870 X2 for review, and FPSLabs has the breakdown of the company’s new high-end gamer, pushing it to the limit with Hell-ride tests utilizing Bioshock, Oblivion, and F.E.A.R., amongst others. The card performed like a monster in most arenas, though when it went up against EA’s monster Crysis, even the dual-GPU card buckled under the intense pressure of the game, getting a surprise beating from the supposedly-less-powerful NVIDIA 8800GTS 512. We won’t give you the nine-page rundown, but you can get the idea. The company also recently released a more consumer-oriented set of cards, the Radeon HD 3650 and 3450, meant for a kinder, gentler user — you can check all the info on those dudes in the read link. Enjoy!

[Thanks, Robert C]

Read - AMD Radeon HD 3870 X2 Review
Read - ATI Radeon HD Refresh: The 3650 and 3450 Arrive

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Source: Joshua Topolsky

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Filed under: Misc. Gadgets, Gaming

Diamond is no stranger to packin’ an awful lot of RAM onto graphics cards, and apparently, the forthcoming VFX 2000 Series Professional Workstation GPU will keep the legacy alive. According to Hot Hardware, Diamond is readying a 2GB (of GDDR4 memory, no less) professional card based on the R600 (now known as the HD 2900 XT), and reportedly, “the card’s PCB has been modified from the standard HD 2900 XT reference design to support the workstation-class features inherent to the FireGL line of professional graphics cards.” Still, there’s no word yet on what frequencies the GPU and RAM will hum along at, but word on the street has this beast launching “in the coming weeks.” Click on for another glimpse.Continue reading Diamond planning HD 2900 XT-based 2GB VFX 2000 pro GPU?

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Source: Darren Murph

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Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

Yeah, we all agreed that the Quadro Plex 1000 was hot stuff in its heyday, but NVIDIA’s latest GPU server blows away prior iterations by cramming four Quadro FX 5600s into a 1U enclosure. The Quadro Plex VCS Server packs a “record number” of GPUs into a 1U form factor, and its 6GB frame buffer (1.5GB per GPU) and mind-boggling computational abilities should please those interested in remote graphics / offline rendering. Additionally, it’s built to “dynamically allocate compute, geometry, shading, and pixel processing power for optimized GPU performance,” and while there’s no mention of a price, those actually in the market for this beast probably aren’t concerned.

[Via MacsimumNews]

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Source: Darren Murph

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Filed under: Desktops, Gaming

According to “sources” at AMD, the firm’s official graphics card diagnostic and validation software was recently discovered “to have a bug that failed to detect defective ATI Radeon HD 2400 and 2600 graphics cards.” The problem was actually discovered by various “channel vendors” who supposedly pointed out an error in the BIOS application process, and it was noted that Asus, MSI, and Gigabyte were all bitten by the mishap. Thankfully, the glitch can seemingly be rectified by “reapplying the BIOS,” but now some 20,000 to 30,000 units are already being shipping back in order to be mended before reaching consumers’ hands; interestingly, there’s no mention of a remedy for the “small number” of end users that may actually own one of these marred boards. Nevertheless, AMD has responded by stating that this ordeal was simply “an isolated incident,” and assured us all that “measures were taken to solve the issue as soon as it was detected.”

[Via TGDaily]

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Source: Darren Murph

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