New NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GT Available for Back-to-School Season is an NVidia press release estimating that after paying tuition, people can also afford $449 for a videocard. Compared to the GTX, the GT has one less vertex shader unit and lower memory clock speed, but the rest is pretty much the same. Tech Report has a preview with benchmarks and all that. HardOCP reviews the BFGTech GeForce 7800 GT.

So, like I said at the outset, the card is fast, and it's less expensive than the GeForce 7800 GTX. The performance differences between the two were narrowed a little bit in our testing because we used an "overclocked in the box" GeForce 7800 GT and a stock-clocked GTX. Even so, I'd have a hard time finding the justification for spending an extra hundred-plus dollars on a 7800 GTX now that the 7800 GT has arrived. None of these cards are cheap, but the 7800 GT is easily a better value than its pricier sibling. Either card will get you the full feature set of NVIDIA's G70 GPU, and the performance delta between them isn't huge.

If you're looking to upgrade to nVidia's latest and greatest, you better make sure your motherboard is up to snuff. The Inquirer is reporting that nVidia will only release the 7800 GTX in the PCI-Express flavor, meaning no AGP version. ATI, however, still plans to support AGP with its next series of video cards.

NVidia today officially announced their new GPU, the GeForce 7800 GTX. Clocked at 430mhz and equipped with 600Mhz GDDR3 memory and 24 pixel pipelines, the PCI-Express only card is available right now at "major online retailers". The cards won't come cheap though, expect to spend at least $599. Previews with plenty of benchmarks can be found at Tech Report, HardOCP and AnandTech. How about a little something on Battlefield 2 performance

Right now Battlefield 2 will probably be the concern of most gamers. This game has been much anticipated and, as a gamer, we are sure you want to know which card is going to play it better. Well, before the GeForce 7800 GTX arrived we could have easily said that the Radeon X850 XT-PE would play it best. As our gameplay analysis shows, the ATI X850 XT-PE seems to simply play the game better. However, once we throw the GeForce 7800 GTX in the mix, the tables flip rapidly. The GeForce 7800 GTX improves performance greatly allowing a high resolution with Transparency AA. We were delighted to see such a large increase in performance with SLI and found we could enable TR SSAA at 4x with two GeForce 7800 GTX. This game suffers from a lot of aliasing as there is a lot of vegetation. You will want a video card that can run this game at a high resolution with Anti-Aliasing that can apply AA to the vegetation for the best image quality in this game. The GeForce 7800 GTX not only provides this, but it also does it with extremely fast performance.

Well here's some news out of left field. It appears that Sony and nVidia have been jointly developing the PS3 GPU:

TOKYO and SANTA CLARA, CA. DECEMBER 7, 2004 Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. (SCEI) and NVIDIA Corporation (Nasdaq: NVDA) today announced that the companies have been collaborating on bringing advanced graphics technology and computer entertainment technology to SCEI highly anticipated next-generation computer entertainment system. Both companies are jointly developing a custom graphics processing unit (GPU) incorporating NVIDIA next-generation GeForce and SCEI system solutions for next-generation computer entertainment systems featuring the Cell processor.

Didn't see that that one coming.

TechReport has an excellent in depth look at that SLI technology that is making a comeback in the form of some NVidia cards paired up and sucking power like crazy. Not quite perfectly stable yet. :(

NVidia and Intel today announced that they have signed a multi-year patent cross-license agreement which, among other things, will see NVidia create motherboard chipsets for the Intel platform. Up till now, NVidia's popular nForce platform was AMD only.

Nvidia has released version 66.93 of the ForceWare drivers for their GeForce line of videocards. The driver is WHQL certified, and you can find PDF release notes here.

HardOCP, Tech Report, AMD Zone, Viper Lair, Bjorn3D, Hardware Analysis and Neoseeker all have previews / announcements of the nForce 4, NVidia's latest AMD motherboard chipset. New is PCI-Express support, RAID morphing, SATA II support and several other features. Boards will be out soon.

Various sites have taken a look at the new NVidia GeForce 6600GT, the cheaper cousin of the 6800. Read impressions/previews on HardOCP, Tech Report, nVnews, Beyond3D, Hexus, Anand Tech. The GeForce 6600 GT will be retailing for $199, and will be available as an PCI-Express card this month with an AGP version following some time soon.

Beyond3D has a comparison of a few of the NVidia 6800 cards to look at to help you decide on which card is right for you if you're considering a 6800 series NVidia card.

NVidia today announced the GeForce 6600 series, which will include a regular version of that chipset along with a GT version. Both these cards are considerably more affordable than the 6800 cards, with the regular 6600 card setting you back $149 while the GT version will be $199. Though the press release mentions they'll have awesome performance in DOOM 3, that of course remains to be seen. There's a benchmark-less preview on Tech Report.

To quote HardOCP for digging this up and sitting through an hour conference call.. "Last week we reported (several times) on NVIDIA’s 2Q earnings as well as the string of articles “analyzing” NVIDIA’s shortcomings. It seems that in the midst of all the news of NVIDIA posting a loss, everyone missed the part of the conference call that said NVIDIA was releasing a new card at QuakeCon. The conference call is over an hour long and registration is required."

NVidia has released new ForceWare drivers, available for WinXP/2000 as well as Win9x/ME. Version 61.76 release notes can be found here (PDF format), there are specific fixes for games like Far Cry and Battlefield Vietnam.

As expected NVidia announced the new GeForce 6 chipset series today, which will feature the GeForce 6800 Ultra and GeForce 6800 at first. The new chipset features a 16 pipeline architecture, supports the DirectX 9.0 Shader Model 3.0 and according to NVidia it will have "eight times the floating-point shader power", "four times the shadow processing power" and "double the vertex processing power" compared to the GeForce FX. There's also this press release with publisher & developer support, and you can find tech demos here. Previews with benchmarks of the Ultra version have been posted on HardOCP, AnandTech, Tech-Report, FiringSquad and Hardware Analysis. So when can you find the new cards in stores? In about a month. The GeForce 6800 Ultra will be $499, the non-Ultra version $299. And yes, NVidia recommends a 480W PSU for the Ultra version of the card.

For now, I think we've established a few things about the NV40 with all of our testing. First and foremost among these is the fact that NVIDIA isn't blowing smoke this time around. Many of our crazy tests in this mega-long review are aimed at exposing weaknesses or just verifying proper operation of the GPU, and the GeForce 6800 Ultra passed with flying colors. The NV40 is exceptionally good, with no notable weaknesses in performance or capability. NVIDIA has caught up to ATI's seminal R300 chip in virtually every respect, while adding a host of new features that make NV40 a better graphics processor, including long shader programs, more mathematical precision, and floating-point framebuffer blends. And it's a freaking titan of graphics performance.

NVidia has released new ForceWare drivers, for all of you with GeForce videocards. The 56.64 release is available for Windows XP/2000 and Win9x/ME. You can read about new features here.

NVidia has released new ForceWare videocard drivers for Windows XP/2000 and Windows 9x/ME. There is increased performance on nForce 3 systems, HDTV output has been improved (if you even have it), and the 5900XT is now fully supported (full release notes in PDF format here).

NVidia has finally released an updated nForce (ForceWare) driver release, once again including the NVIDIA IDE driver for Windows 2000 and XP. Besides that the driver pack offers several compability fixes and audio improvements.

It took a while but FiringSquad has posted an article on the recent NVidia editor day press event. Along with info on NVidia's plans, there are Q&As with Epic's Tim Sweeney and ION Storm's Tim Little.

Nvidia has released new Detonator videocard drivers for Windows 2000 and XP. The new 52.16 release boasts "enhanced image quality for both anisotropic filtering and anti-aliasing" and "a new user friendly interface" among other things (full .PDF format release notes here). Thanks Stuart.

Gamers Depot has posted NVidia's response to yesterday's Half-Life 2 benchmark day which was sponsored by ATI. They say newer drivers will show NVidia's products in a much better light when tested with Half-Life 2.

In addition to the developer efforts, our driver team has developed a next-generation automatic shader optimizer that vastly improves GeForce FX pixel shader performance across the board. The fruits of these efforts will be seen in our Rel.50 driver release. Many other improvements have also been included in Rel.50, and these were all created either in response to, or in anticipation of the first wave of shipping DirectX 9 titles, such as Half Life 2. ...