NVIDIA has been having a rough couple of quarters recently posting a loss thanks to defective GPUs in notebooks and then seeing profits decline significantly. That hasn’t stopped the graphics firm from bringing new products to market like the 9400M GPU and today it has announced a new professional graphics card.

The Quadro FX 5800 is the industry’s first graphics card to use 4GB of graphics memory. The card features CUDA massively parallel processing architectures and is aimed at the oil/gas exploration, medical imaging, and styling/design markets.

The GPU has come of age and is no longer something that titillates hoards of gamers with promises of better video game graphics alone. Today the GPU can do many things from being used as a super computing platform to greatly accelerating many applications more efficiently than a CPU can.

One of the biggest new features in Adobe Creative Suite 4 introduced not so long ago was the ability for the software to take advantage of the power of the GPU for faster processing and applying of things like filters. NVIDIA has announced a new GPU-based product called the Quadro CX that is designed specifically to accelerate Creative Suite 4.

If there’s one thing NVIDIA has been known for over the last several years, it’s being late to the game with drivers. However, NVIDIA has been working hard this week to announce several new drivers, which gamers have been waiting for.

Earlier this week, NVIDIA announced the drivers to enable PhysX on its eight series and higher GPUs that gamers have been anticipating since NVIDIA bought PhysX. NVIDIA has now announced that it is first to ship OpenGL 3.0 drivers, just two days after the OpenGL 3.0 standard was announced.

NVIDIA is by far the largest and most profitable maker of video cards and GPUs on the planet. This week NVIDIA announced its Q2 fiscal business update and its profits weren’t up to expectations from investors or analysts.

NVIDIA stated that its Q2 revenue and gross margins are expected to be lower that it previously stated in its conference call in May. NVIDIA says that it expects total revenue to be in the area of $875 million to $950 million. This reduction is blamed in part on market weakness around the world and delayed next generation MCP products along with price adjustments to be competitive.

NVIDIA today unveiled a 512MB version of its GeForce 8800 GTS graphics card targeted towards PC gamers. The new Nividia GeForce 8800 GTS 512 MB is priced between around $300 and $350.

The Nividia GeForce 8800 GTS 512 MB card comes with what Nividia says is 25% more graphics processing than similar Nividia products offered in its price range. It sports a HD graphics engine which can do full offload of H.264 video decoding so the CPU can perform other tasks. It also supports SLI technology, though you’ll need another 512 MB card to pull this off.

The GeForce 8400 GS graphics card from NVIDIA is now available for purchase across the land. This entry level gaming accessory is at a low price point, somewhere around $50-60, and gives PC owners 450MHZ clock speed, 256 MB of DDR2 memory, 16 shader processors but at the cost of half the GeForce 8500’s bandwidth.

NVIDIA’s PureVideo HD is also included with it to increase decoding speeds for Blu-ray, HD-DVD, MPEG-2 or VC-1 video files. It also has the Quantum Effects physics processing technology, dual DVI outputs for two monitor support and is HDCP, PCI Express, OpenGL and turbo cache ready. It’s not high end but for a cost effective solution to speeding up your system while playing a movie or a game, this should do nicely.

via Electronista

NVIDIA has three new graphics cards on the market for low to medium end prices but with high end capabilities. The GeForce 8600 GTS, 8600 GT and the 8500 GT include processor advantages that were previously only capable in the 8800 series of cards including Shader Model 4.0 support, GigaThread technology, Quantum Effects physics processing capability and the Lumenex engine which gives 128-bit floating point HDR rendering performance and anti-aliasing levels of 16x.

The 8600 GTS is the big boy of the three, is most expensive ($229) and features 32-stream processors clocked at 1.45 GHz and reference core and memory clock speeds at 675 MHz and 1.0 GHz, respectively.

The 8600 GT ($159) is a slight step down, offering shader clock speed at 1.18 GHz (but at the same 32-stream rate) while the reference core and memory clock speeds are set at 540 …

NVIDIA has announced two of high-end graphics processors with a corresponding high price. These units aren’t meant to be kicking pixels around for “World of Warcraft” or “Supreme Commander” but are intended for high performance rendering computers used in engineering design firms, scientific research, medical device designers and special effects companies.

The NVIDIA Quadro FX 4600 and Quadro FX 5600 have new unified architecture designs, 1.5 GB frame buffers, next generation vertex and pixel programmability, and utilize GPU computing for their visualization problems. The Quadros also pump out faster and bigger 3D texturing (up to 8K by 8K images can be generated), have dual-link connectivity, smoother video playback, more accurate color and image scaling for SD and HD content.

If you’re thinking that this kind of power would sound perfect inside your rig, you can pick them …

If you’re coming up a little short when opening your wallet to upgrade your graphics card, Nvidia’s new GeForce 8800 GTS 320 MB may help ease your suffering.

With half the memory as its big brother, this GTS may not seem like such a buy at first – until you notice that the price is $100 less and the specs are pretty decent if you want to enjoy good Direct X 10 gaming action.

The 320 MB G80 card runs at 500 MHz, the same clock frequency as the 640 MB version and just 75 Mhertz slower than the GTX sugar daddy GeForce card (which is double the price.) Also, this new GTS has its memory bandwidth upper capacity at 64 GB/sec and a texture fill rate of 24 billion/sec, so unless you really, really need faster texture mapping and lighting effects, you’ll be …

In previous articles about NVIDIA Cards ( BFG GeForce 8800 GTS and Asus EN8800 GTX ) we mentioned the fact that the only thing missing was the DirectX 10 games. That’s true but there is also something else missing that’s pretty vital, the drivers! It appears that NVIDIA has delayed releasing drivers to the general public for the N80 line of video cards.

From NVIDIA’s Vista page: ** GeForce 8800 requires updated drivers for Vista, which will be available to download when Vista is available at retail in late January..

So all of you gamers that are anxious to get your hands on this line of cards to try out the performance in Vista may want to hold off at least until the end of January. Of course if you are planning on sticking with Windows …

So you want a DirectX 10 Video card but you don’t want to sell a kidney? The BFG GeForce 8800 GTS might be for you. Not that this video card is cheap. The retail price is around $500 dollars. Its only cheap when you compare it to a card like the ASUS EN8800 GTX.

So what does five hundred bucks get you? A pretty good video card, that’s what.

While the GTX model mentioned above has 768 MB of memory (wow) this card only has 640 MB. It has a narrower memory path than the GTX. That means that fewer bites can transfer from the memory to the processor at one time.

The GTS does support SLI. But spending a cool grand on two 8800 GTS’s might seem like overkill …

Prepare for the next generation of video cards. DirectX 10 is right around the corner with Vista and with it the graphics upgrade games have been waiting for. In fact, DirectX 10 might be the only compelling reason to upgrade to Vista. If the screen shots we’ve seen are any indication, graphics are going to get a whole lot better.

Of course with new software comes need for new hardware that supports it. The next generation cards are coming out. The Asus EN8800 GTX is a high end video card that supports DirectX 10 and DirectX 9. In fact DirectX 9 support is incredible. As many games will still use DirectX 9 in the foreseeable future a card like this might be worth it to kick up the graphics on today’s …

NVIDIA Corporation today introduced two new product families that are sure to maintain the reign of the PC as the ultimate gaming platform. These new products families represent the hardware foundation that will allow users to start building their own definitive PC gaming platforms that take advantage of Microsoft’s DirectX 10 and Windows Vista.

The GeForce 8800 graphics processing unit (GPU) and the NVIDIA nForce 680i SLI media and communications processor are designed specifically for Intel Core 2 Quad and Core 2 Duo processors. In addition, the GeForce 8800 GPUs are the world’s first to support Microsoft DirectX 10, which will be introduced with Microsoft Windows Vista. More than 20 DirectX 10 titles have been developed to take advantage of next-generation NVIDIA GPUs.

“We set out to build the ultimate platform for PC gaming and high-definition video,” said Jen-Hsun Huang, president and CEO at

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NVIDIA has now made it possible for you to watch HD DVD or Blu-ray movies on your PC with some new video drivers having PureVideo HD technology. The PureVideo technology encompasses multiple features that will help improve the video portion of your multimedia experience with your PC.

Aside from just creating the drivers to support the HD DVD and Blu-ray formats, PureVideo provides some hardware acceleration to decode H.264, VC-1, WMV and MPEG-2 movies that will make images clearer than normal, and up to six times the detail of a regular DVD movie. The driver software will also help your PC run a little more efficiently when using multiple applications since it takes on some of the video processing instead of taxing the PC’s CPU and 3D engine.

“This is a milestone in PC entertainment,” stated Scott Vouri who is general manager of multimedia at …