Consoles Can No Longer Match PC’s

Nvidia knows graphics better then any other company on the face of the planet. They create the fastest graphics cards around, their GPUs are regularly in consoles, and they come up with some wicked promo videos. Toms Hardware recently caught up with the VP of Nvidia where they fanned the flames of the console vs PC war. Despite having an interest in developing graphics chips for both platforms, the company seemed to lean towards PCs being faster.

The way he looks at it, is that there are just too many power restrictions with a console. With a smaller power supply to power the unit, it is no longer possible to stuff in the biggest GPU and other high end parts and have a cool and quiet console. This is an understandable view point, but too bad for all of the console fan boys out there.

Nvidia GeForce Fun

It’s been all to long since I did any blogging, so we are doing a reboot and I’ve decided to get back to writing this blog on a regular basis. So why don’t we start with some fun? Apparently some people love their video cards, and their Lego so much that they will build their video cards out of Lego. It’s pretty cool actually, the kid has even managed to create a working fan. It may have cost $1640 to build, but if your a nerd, this is well… DAAMMNN!

For a little more detail, read here!

 

Tegra Note 7

Image from news.softpedia.com

Nvidia has put a much more concentrated into moving into the mobile market. With that said, they have recently launched the Tegra Note 7. As happens with everything Nvidia makes, they have turned to their partners such as EVGA and Asus to manufacture and distribute the product.

At $200, the Tegra Note 7 proves to be a viable option for anyone who wants to do decent mobile gaming, 3D work, or really anything. Of course there were some items that had to be a trade off. The screen has a resolution of 1280×800, and 1GB of ram, these stats are lower then that of the Nexus 7.

There is a 4 hour battery life, which is right in line with the 2013 model of the Nexus 7. That is of course with power saving off and in high performance. If you are not doing intensive tasks, you can turn power saving on and be in lower performance modes and get almost 6 hours of battery life, which isn’t too shabby!

The Tegra Note 7 does pretty well in all benchmarks, and given it’s price point it offers a lot of value. To read more details and see the benchmarks, take a look at this article.

Nvidia GTX 780Ti Review

The Nvidia GTX 780Ti is a pretty badass GPU. Aimed to fight back towards AMDs recent releases, it looks like Nvidia still knows how to create a great GPU.

Clocked at 875mhz, 2880 CUDA cores and 240 texture units, the 780Ti runs some decent numbers on paper. The 780Ti proves to be one of the fastest single gpu cards around. For an in depth review, go to the linked article.

Nvidia Sponsors Paris Gaming Week

There’s nothing like getting your geek on. No company would know that better then Nvidia. This past weekend was the  gaming competition in Paris, with over a quarter of a million gamers attending the event. That’s a hell of a lot of gamers, and it’s going to be……. Epic!

Nvidia of course had to put in a sweet little corporate plug on the event. Gamers in the finals will be equipped with PC’s that include the Geforce GTX 760 and 770’s. You can find some of the footage on YouTube. It was apparently quite the event, and I am sure Monster doubled their yearly revenue.

Nvidia Driver Release

Today Nvidia has released their 331.65 drivers. The drivers work on everything from Windows 8 back to Windows XP on desktop. Unfortunately though, it looks like for mobile users, Windows XP and possibly Vista won’t be getting the driver updates. Fair enough, as both of those operating systems are getting really long in the tooth.

The drive package includes Nvidias GeForce Experience 1.7.0 release, and the whole package includes a significant boost in a number of games.

Nvidia’s release notes state increases as follows:

• Up to 12% in Battlefield 4
• Up to 19% in Sniper Elite V2
• Up to 13% in Dirt: Showdown
• Up to 9% in Metro: Last Light
• Up to 9% in Sleeping Dogs
• Up to 8% in Max Payne 3
• Up to 6% in F1 2012

It’s always worth staying on top of drivers, as there can be a lot of performance and stability fixes. So make sure to go update!

Nvidia Shield

Image courtesy of shield.nvidia.com

 

Nintendo has managed to dominate the handheld gaming market for several decades now. Their Gameboy handheld consoles have been a staple in the market. However, Nvidia is looking to change the game with their SHIELD.

Nvidia seems to pack some pretty good hardware into a relatively small package with their SHIELD. It also looks like it is bascially an Xbox controller with a HD screen attached to it. Nvidia has managed to take advantage of Googles Android platform, and games, to make sure that there is a good library of games available for the SHIELD.

One of the big advantages of the SHIELD is that it allows you to stream the web, videos, and Android games in 1080p to your TV. This provides a lot of flexibility for the tiny gaming machine, and has a huge advantage compared to what has been out there for the last little while.

Check out Nvidia’s site for more tech details and so on. I think Nvidia could have a real winner here.

Nvidia Price Drops

With the recent announcement of the new AMD Radeon cards, Nvidia needed to make a comeback. The easiest, and probably best, idea was to drop the prices of their current lineup of cards. The GTX 780 is now $499, the GTX 770 is $329.  The newly announce GTX 780Ti will cost $699 and will hit the shelves November 7, 2013.

The recent price drop makes the Nvidia cards will make the line up a lot more competitive.

This Tom’s Hardware has  bit more information on the recent price drops.

AMD R9 290x Review

picture courtesy of legitreviews.com

Nvidia has now been the uncontested high end market champion in GPUs for almost a full year. AMD hasn’t offered anything near the same high end price point, nor anything that could really compete performance wise.

That is until now… AMD has just launched the R7 and R9 graphics cards, based off a new architecture, it provides some great new cards. The R9 290x was reviewed on Toms Hardware, and it looks like AMD has their cross-hairs aimed right at the throne of ultra-high end graphics cards.

One of the biggest new innovations in the R9 290x is the increased memory and redesigned controller. This allows for a massive increase in the GPUs capacity to create the geometries on the screen, and as a result increase the performance of the card.

Another big innovation is the loss of the connector required for crossfire functionality. Now that we are in the age of Ultra HD and people running extremely high resolutions on their computer, the crossfire bridge was becoming a hindrance at the higher resolutions. Instead the GPUs will now be communicating across the PCI Express bus. PCI Express offers a high bandwidth rate, and therefore does not limit at the higher resolutions. This means big benefits for anyone playing at the highest ratings.

AMD has also included a new audio processor on to their R9 290x. The idea behind doing this is too utilize the power of the GPU to process information extremely quickly, and to let the CPU work on more important processes.  This means better audio, and better performance. Seems like a win-win situation to me.

When Toms Hardware ran through the benchmarks, it shows the R9 29x to beat out it’s primary competition, Nvidias 780x boards. Although the R9 isn’t the best of the best, it’s price tag reflects that. It’s a good board at a price that is at least a bit affordable.

To see benchmarks and read the Toms Hardware review follow the link!

Nvidia ShadowPlay

Image From gembells.com

Pretty well anyone who has played PC games has had some moments where they wish had recorded what just happened. There have been a variety of programs out there to help users capture gameplay, but many are resource hogs and severely slow down gameplay.

Nvidia seems to think it has solved this problem. With the launch of ShadowPlay on October 28, Nvidia is hoping they can come out with the ultimate gameplay capture technology. The encoding for the capture technology is already built into the 6 and 7 series graphics cards, so if you are running the latest Nvidia GPUS then you are ready to go.

ShadowPlay continually has 20 minutes of gameplay saved into a temporary video file. When you decide you want to have a hard save of some footage, you just press a button and you are done. The video will be editable in Windows Movie Maker, making it easy to edit.

Although, probably not a real selling point of a Nvidia GPU, it is an interesting new innovation, and could be pretty cool to have if you have a Nvidia card anyways.

There’s an entry on there site here if you want to read more.