NVidia has released some new drivers for their nForce 1 and nForce 2 motherboard chipsets, for Win2k, WinXP and Win98SE/ME. The new release adds ASIO and OpenAL driver support and fixes some bugs.

Beyond3D has a new Q&A with NVidia's Geoff Ballew. Questions are about the GeForce FX, and topics include the 128-bit bus, texture mapping units, floating point speed, shaders, FSAA and Anisotropic filtering among other things.

The NDA has been lifted, the NVidia GeForce FX has officially been announced. You can find articles on HardOCP, AnandTech, FiringSquad, Guru of 3D, Bjorn3D, Hexus and Beyond 3D and there are various press releases on nvidia.com. Some of the features: 1Ghz DDR-2 memory, 64-bit and 128-bit floating point color, 128 bit memory bus width, and of course it supports DirectX 9. Of course what we care about is benchmark numbers, and we'll have to wait a while for that. But rumor has it it's going to be pretty damn fast.

"Computer games today are fast and exciting, yet they still lack the ability to engage us emotionally," said Jen-Hsun Huang, president and CEO at NVIDIA. "With the GeForce FX GPU, game developers now have the power to create awe-inspiring visuals and bring character emotion to life. GeForce FX enables a new type of interactive expression we call cinematic computing."
"The NVIDIA GeForce FX GPU is the result of ten years of passionate effort by the best 3D graphics engineers in the business and includes technologies invented at NVIDIA and 3dfx," Huang continued. "The GeForce FX GPU delivers unprecedented 3D graphics performance and the NVIDIA Unified Driver Architecture ensures the reliability and quality that has become the hallmark of NVIDIA GPUs." ...

Though Nvidia will officially announce their new graphics chipset tomorrow (the one known as NV30 until now), Investors.com already has a story about it where it's mentioned the new chip will be called the GeForce FX and will go on sale in February. The price? $360.

Graphics chipmaker Nvidia Corp. (NVDA) plans to unveil its latest line of chips on Monday. Nvidia says its new GeForce FX chips will bring to home video games the same level of animation in today's Hollywood movies. The company's earlier chips were part of the technology used to make "Shrek" and "Monsters Inc." "We've been trying to bring 3-D graphics to the mass market," said Mike Hara, Nvidia vice president of investor relations. "We're moving at a rapid rate toward enabling people to do on a PC what people are able to do in cinema today."

Thanks AnandTech.

Hardware Accelerated has posted a Q&A with NVidia Chief Scientist David Kirk. Kirk is asked about the CG language, the competition, the nForce 2, AGP8x, and a few other hardware topics.

So a little while ago we had a story about how the next-gen NVidia cards (The NV30) will probably hit the holiday season, but not really be out in full force until Q1 of next year. Well this website (Thanks aggressor) has a few pictures of a recent "NVidia Mania Day" held by NVidia folks for the press to talk about their upcoming part. Perhaps a few of you speak Korean, but for the rest of us we're stuck checking out the pictures. Here are a few things that stand out from NVidia's presentation:

- More than 2X performance of GeForce4
- Better anti-aliasing
- Full floating point throughout pipeline (51,000,000,000 operations)
- 3X the size of a P4 processor

I dont really think I plan on doing my next videocard purchase until DOOM3 / Half-Life2 / Duke4 / etc. show up. Yeah, I dunno why I listed Duke4 either... :). update: Speaking of this stuff, Anandtech has some interesting stuff on NVidia's 8X AGP card. Thanks -Panther-.

It looks like the folks at ATI are going to be sitting pretty for the holiday season. We've been hearing rumblings about NVidia having troubles getting their NV30 / GeForce5 card out to market and that seems to be becoming more of a reality. Here's the latest from CNET:

"Basically, they missed the cycle," Hans Mosesmann, a Prudential Securities analyst, said of Nvidia. "Really (the NV30) is a fall product that's now been pushed out for all intents and purposes to the spring." Once NV30 products do appear, they’re likely to be 25 percent to 50 percent faster than the Radeon 9700

Of course by next year there's no telling what ATI might be close to having ready.

Are You Ready? That's what NVidia wants to know. I am guessing they are introducing a pair of magic sneakers. Thanks drago_core.

If you want to know what the performance difference between all the different Nvidia Detonator releases is, Guru of 3D has a comparison article. Twenty four different versions of the drivers were tested.

NVIDIA nForce2 Engineered to Deliver Outstanding Performance for New AMD Athlon CPUs is one of several press releases out this morning, as AMD announces their XP2800 and XP2700 CPUs (with 333mhz FSB) at the same time as NVidia announces the nForce2 motherboard. Reviews of new XP running on the nForce2 are up at HardOCP, AMD Zone, Tech Report, Aces Hardware. Various other sites have also taken a look at the new AMD CPUs though not always in combination with the nForce2: Deviant PC, HardcoreWare, Bjorn3D, The Tech Zone, AnandTech (and his nForce2 performance article).

According to The Inquirer, NVidia will announce their newest graphics chipset NV30 at Comdex. This event is held November 18 - 22. Cards might be released in December if that's the case, but it might just as well be early 2003.

NVIDIA Offers Industry's First and Only Full Family of AGP 8X GPU and Core Logic Solutions is the lengthy title of a new NVidia press release, announcing that all their GeForce 4 cards will now ship with support for AGP 8X. Of course the nForce 2 motherboard chipset will support AGP 8X as well.

AnandTech has a pretty interesting article online, taking a tour of the ATI and NVidia plants. If you wanted to know how all these super fast GPUs get designed and tested, here's your chance.

UKGamer has published the first part of their NVidia interview conducted at ECTS. Topics include questions about competition, and knitting sweaters and which weaves are best for the cold winters.

There is a Q&A with NVidia's Tony Tamasi on HomeLAN Fed, Tony being the general manager of desktop graphics over there. He's asked about the success of the company, the delay between new graphic features and games that actually use them, if the GeForce4MX is not just a horrible product, response to the nForce 2 and more.

NVidia has released new Detonator drivers for videocards based on their chipsets, making a version jump from 3x to 40.41. Up to 25% increase in performance is promised. Windows 2000/XP only at the moment. Thanks Erik.

According to a CNET story, videocard maker VisionTek hasn't gone out of business quite yet (story). Creditors have appointed a trustee, but the company will remain in business for the time being while the trustee tries to determine if the company can be sold. Tech support should continue as well, however CNET mentions that "Telephone calls made Monday and Tuesday to VisionTek's main number and tech-support line went unanswered".

According to this story on HardOCP, videocard maker VisionTek is gone. They were the number one retailer of NVidia videocards in North America, but apparently that wasn't enough to keep them going.

AnandTech and Voodoo Extreme both have articles on Nvidia's upcoming chipset, NV30 and its CineFX architecture. AnandTech managed to find out that the part finally taped out last week and Nvidia's current schedule calls for a November shipping date.

Voodoo Extreme has posted a Q&A with David Kirk, who is the Chief Scientist of NVidia. David is asked about API evolvement, the control developers get when they use the new Cg language for shader effects and other Cg related questions, if developers will ever "talk" directly to the GPU, pixel and vertex shader programming, and various other questions where you have to know your buzzwords.