Just yesterday, we had a conference call with Ujesh Desai, NVIDIA's General Manager of GPU. He wanted to give us some updates on NVIDIA's latest GPU developments as well as some glimpses of what NVIDIA has in store for us in 2006.

Adrian's Rojak Pot

If you checked out our world exclusive benchmarks of the new Quake 4 1.05 with dual core and multi CPU performance enhancements you found that we had none. Well turns out there is an issue causing this, and our results are correct.

AMDZone

Late last week, we had two exclusive insider reports in regards to NVIDIA?s upcoming product strategies. These included the company?s decision to phase out its 7800GTX 512MB early next year and launching the 7800GS in AGP flavor to cover the missing market.

We have done some preliminary tests on Dual Core AMD CPU with the latest Forceware 81.95 NVIDIA drivers with Dual Core Optimizations. Results are very promising...

VR-Zone

After some interesting discussion across a couple of forums this past couple of days, coupled with the desire to put into the public domain the information I'd received during the course of the week, I've taken some time out to look at the relationship between marketing firm AEG and graphics giant NVIDIA, in particular their so-called 'outreach programme' and what it really entails.

EliteBastards

This news is six months old but for various reasons is still not widely known. nVidia dropped "Unified" driver support in Windows XP/2000 for certain GPUs (Graphics Processing Units), starting with driver v77.72. This is not the first time they have done this with their "Unified" driver architecture but it is significant in its disparity. The irony is the lack of "Unification".

A new version of nvFlash (NVIDIA Firmware Update Utility) is available, and the most current version is nvFlash v5.25

nVidia BIOS Modifier has been updated to version v3.0 ! This tool must be used by ADVANCED users ONLY! This tool works correctly with BIOSes of 6x00 / 7x00 series cards ONLY (including QUADRO series, built on NV4x and higher) !!! BIOSes of 5x00 and older aren?t supported.

Integrated slides and video of our SIGGRAPH 2005 Exhibitor Tech Talks (Sponsored Sessions) are now available.

Nvidia Developer

The Problem: Shimmering is a problem that can occur between mipmap transisitions on various hardware within the G70 series. Prior on the Geforce 6 series you could set the LoD clamp and turn on High Quality and shimmering would be removed. However it turns out that these fixes did not provide adequate results on Geforce 7 hardware.

After the successful launch of NVIDIA's GeForce 7-series, a number of consumers complained about the poor texture filtering quality. Is this a driver bug, or is this another degradation in Anisotropic Filtering quality?

Bit-Tech

At first I thought someone was joking when they told me this web link can crash your PC using simple HTML code and Internet Explorer. I suspected it might crash just the browser at worst and was simply a joke related site at best. However, after trying it I can confirm it can crash your PC. But it does so through an apparent bug in some video card drivers.

The shimmering issue is being addressed by NVIDIA and they hope to have a fix soon. Brian Burke from NVIDIA e-mailed us regarding it (see quote below). Meanwhile, you can check out some possible approaches to reduce or eliminate shimmering in some of your games in our forums.

Nvnews.net

Ever since its launch in the fall of last year, nForce 4 has brought us SLI capability. Configurations for PCI Express slots in nForce 4 SLI motherboards must be selected by using a paddle that can be flipped to allow for either 2 x8 connections or full bandwidth for one with the other disabled. There is added flexibility on an nForce 4 SLI motherboard, but this flexibility comes with some limitations. Today, NVIDIA sheds the shackles of the paddle selector and limited bandwidth with the new nForce 4 SLI X16 chipset.

AnandTech

NVIDIA is teasing people with a new flash ad on their home page called, "The Power of 3". Now I have no idea what this could be, but I have a feeling that the leaked 80.40 drivers spilled out something of this nature. The Power of 3 could mean GTX / 2 CPU Cores - (Pentium D or Athlon 64 X2). That's the only logical solution I can come up with. I can't see the 7800 GT and possibly a 7600 as the "The Power of 3". Do you know what it is? Drop some word in the comments section and make a guess!

3DChipset

It seems like the current batch of ASUS V9999LE cards based on 6800LE can be soft modded to 6800GT. Using Rivatuner, 8 hidden pixel pipelines on V9999LE card can be unlocked unveiling a total of 16 pixel pipelines like the 6800GT/Ultra. The 2 hidden vertex pipelines can also be unlocked to unveil the full 6 vertex pipelines. The 3DMark2005 score jump from 6707 to 9063 as a result.

VR-Zone

nVidia BIOS Modifier has been updated to version v3.0 ! This tool must be used by ADVANCED users ONLY! This tool works correctly with BIOSes of 6x00 / 7x00 series cards ONLY (including QUADRO series, built on NV4x and higher) !!! BIOSes of 5x00 and older aren?t supported.

Just got word from HardwareOC that Sparkle have launched a new range of Graphics cards called Calibre! Click Here

Minimum System Requirements: GeForce 7800 GTX, Windows XP, ForceWare Drivers 77.50 or higher, 512MB system memory, 256MB video memory

Bit-Tech

As you can see, it´s all correct and the clock rates are 470/1300 MHz, as promised. However when we tested the reference card we noticed that RivaTuner tool (by A. Nikolaychuk aka Unwinder) indicated some other clock rate that was about 40MHz higher than nominal (430MHz reference + 40MHz = 470MHz). The matter is that at that time Rivatuner determined the maximal clocking value.