There are still many gamers who have yet to upgrade to Windows Vista. Part of Windows Vista that was most appealing to gamers was DirectX 10 compatibility. DirectX 10 is something you can’t get on Windows XP.

According to AMD when Windows 7 hits market, widely believed to be mid-2009, DirectX 10.1 will be fully supported. According to AMD DirectX 10.1 will be used in the API for the Windows Desktop Manager in Windows 7.

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.

A refresh of Apple’s MacBook Pro, it certainly has good looks. What’s interesting is the multi-touch glass trackpad, which gets rid of a single mouse button and adds some new tricks, like app switching for instance. It’s also slimmed down quite a bit to just 0.95-inches thick, while being just a tad heavier then it’s predecessor at 5.5 pounds.

Under the hood is the fancy “brick” aluminum that helps Apple keep it thin and strong. It also makes room for all the stuff inside, like NVIDIA’s new 9400M GPU + chipset for integrated graphics, plus a 9600M GT switchable discreet graphics chip. You’ll also get an SSD option, with the drive accessible under the battery. The 15.4-inch base model has a retail price of $1999, with a 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo processor, 2GB of DDR3 RAM and both GPUs. For $2499 and you get a faster CPU, 4GB of RAM and a 320GB HDD. The 17-inch MacBook Pro model has a similar configuration, without the redesign.

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.

Today marks the launch of the new NVIDIA GTX 280 video cards. These cards are replacing the dual GPU 9800 GX2 as the king of the performance from NVIDIA. The new video card uses only one GPU and is NVIDIA’s first all new video card class in a while.

ASUS has announced details of its GTX 280 called the ENGTX280/HTDP/1G. The card ships with ASUS’ SmartDoctor utility to adjust the shader clock to provide more performance. The GTX 280 has 1GB of GDDR3 memory. Pricing for the card is $649.99.

Check out this PC case mod. This liquid-cooled motorcycle computer works best when stationary, which sucks because I’d like to zoom down the street and blog at the same time, despite any pedestrian’s dwindling screams behind me.

It was built by Russian casemodder Dennis Ilyin (a.k.a. “Xooler”), and was the first runner up in an NVIDIA-sponsored case building contest. If anyone in TV land is listening, this guy needs his own show where he builds a different case mod every week. And they must be drivable.