Meanwhile ATI Technologies and Nvidia Corp., both leading suppliers of standalone graphics processors, are doing their best to introduce high-performance graphics processing units that are compliant with DirectX 10 next-generation application programming interface, Intel Corp.X-Bit Labs

Undoubtedly, gamers are the primary market for 3D graphics consumer cards. As with any other product, the faster the performance, the higher the price you must pay. Look at high end graphics cards such as ATI's Radeon X1900XTX and NVIDIA's GeForce 7900GTX - these cards are selling at about USD 450 to 600. Having finished the reviews of both cards, we find ourselves asking the question: how will these cards cope with newer games. NVIDIA seems more than happy to 'fix' everything with a driver update (Battlefield 2, Oblivion, Tomb Raider: Legend), much to the anguish of users. Users with ATI cards is somewhat better off - new games usually work right of the bat without any major (graphical) issues.

TMS AA, TSS AA, PA AA, QA AA... is transparency anti-aliasing getting you a bit confused? We're here to give you the low down on just what all the acronyms mean, with lots of clear words and illustrative pictures.

Bit-Tech

Nvidia will this week was showing in-game physics code calculations being run on a graphics processor, the first time this has been done in public, the company claimed today. We have two exclusive small movies available which will show this in action.

NVIDIA is partnering with Havok, arguably the most successful physics engine API for software development, to bring physics processing acceleration to NVIDIA GPUs. Does this spell the end for AGEIA?

PC Perspective

Here is a contributed article from member CrazyRhino. He talks about enabling triple buffer for smoother gaming in this article.

With triple buffering enabled, now we have 3 buffers and the graphics hardware can start rendering into the 3rd buffer without having to wait for the front buffer gets swapped out.

Hello readers and reader, welcome to our new bases series to the subject of graphic cards. Did you not ask you already often how a GPU is constructed and calculates like it of pictures? Did you or want to know already always once how AntiAliasing function or various texture filters? In our bases series to the subject of graphic cards, we will try to explain you all that in simple and intelligible type and manner. In the first part of our series, it concerns the functional method of the GPU.

3DMark uses various game tests which help to decide your score, and all of these game tests are based on the DirectX9 platform. The question remaining on the silent majority?s lips is ?Where are the OpenGL game tests?? In response Futuremark have claimed that OpenGL is not deemed popular enough to warrant incorporation into the program. Is that really so?

Curious to see how ATI's new Super AA modes compare to NVIDIA's SLI Anti-Aliasing? If so, you may want to check out today's article. We've paired NVIDIA's latest GeForce 7800 GTX 256MB and 512MB cards against ATI's CrossFire X1800 XT.

The first official screens of Half Life 2 on the Xbox have emerged. We take a quick look at what appear to be the obvious differences from the PC version, as we gear up for a week of exclusive Half Life 2 new content!

Bit-Tech

The XTreme-G version of nVidia's Forceware 78.03 has been released by TweaksRUs.com

They are also looking for new BetaTesters! See the article for the XTreme-G 78.03-HD drivers for details.

According to Moghul, the Nvidia people announced that the new Unreal Tournament 2007 and Gears of War will both be using the Novodex physics engine (that?s Swiss) and not Havok.

Kotaku

The release of Windows Vista, codename "Longhorn", Beta 1 to testers and the reports that DirectX 10 will indeed ship with that operating system has sparked some discussion on the viability of OpenGL as a games' API for the Windows platform.

John Reynolds looks at Shader Profile Performance Differences in Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory with the new 1.04 patch. See how much difference the Shader Profiles make with ATI and NVIDIA hardware.

SimHQ

We managed to snag an early copy of NVIDIA's new drivers and put SLI antialiasing to the test. Keep reading for a look at the image quality and performance of SLI antialiasing, as well as an explanation of the methods behind the madness.

Longhorn completely reshapes the way Windows handles graphics. DirectX will become an integral part of the operating system, opening up a wealth of 3D technology to any applications. We look under the hood to see how it all fits together.

ExtremeTech

Nun mehr 6 Jahre gibt es die Voodoo2. Aber warum sie aus dem Rechner schmeißen, wenn sie selbst Doom3, einen der 3D-Shooter 2004, flüssig darstellen kann?
Viele denken 'Ohne Beweise glaube ich das nicht!', aber diese sollten jetzt genau aufpassen. Auf VoodooAlert findet ihr die Links zu dem Patch, sowie einer .dll-Datei, welche eventuell benötigt wird. Außerdem gibt es zwei Screenshots, was nun wirklich Beweise genug sein sollten. Screenshot #1
Screenshot #2

There is a new high score in the 3dm2k3 hall of fame of 19,167 which is pretty impressive, until you find out the following:
Gokickrocks wrote:

its not a bug, its a cheat...nvidia added an "option" to "null PS" in their drivers Basically nVidia has added an option to their control panel that will render garbage for an output, but will score unusually well on benchmarks.

This news is still developing, you can read the story at Elite Bastards.

VolariGamers has posted some pictures from Computex 2004.

Naturally, the main highlights of the show were the full HDTV support of the Volari series as well as the PCI Express solutions.
It seems XGI's HDTV solutions have impressed quite a number of people, here's a quote from T-Break: "We were impressed with their HDTV output over a TV-Out connection which made text very readable."

Nathan Glentworth at tweaknews.net has reviewed the ATI VGA swissknife All in Wonder 9600XT. From Tweaknews.net :-
"The All in Wonder 9600XT brings a cost effective alternative to dropping another US$100 to buy the next highest readily available version which is the AIW 9800pro. You can't ignore the fact that this card brings an unbelievable amount of potential to an everyday computer. Instead of just using your computer to surf the web, game and catch up on your work, you can transform that ordinary work box into a complete multimedia center complete with countless audio/video inputs and outputs, a television, a FM radio and lets not forget a very capable gamer" For Full read warp2.. Tweaknews.net/