I want to take a moment to thank our dear readers, and leaders, for the extremely helpful feedback and name suggestions I received after last weeks roundup, thanks!
The marketing battle between AMD and Nvidia continues this week with AMD firing the first shot with this blog questioning Nvidia’s new claim to the GPU performance crown. This comes after the long reign of the HD 5970 which came to a delayed end at the hands of the HD 6990. TechReport’s Geoff Gasior added an interesting angle to this spat by taking a poll of it’s readers on the subject. The HD 6990 had a commanding lead of 78% at 9pm CST.
Just Cause 2 developer Avalanche Studios gained a lot of support from the gaming community this week with their leader, Christofer Sundberg, giving his opinion on DRM and the video game pirating community. It seems that despite the constant ringing of the death knell for PC gaming at least one developer still refuses to sell out the community; and in one way could be seen as buying out the community.
In a series of articles this week Anton (not Shilov) Karmehed detailed the upcoming AMD Radeon HD 6790. First announcing a launch date of March 31st and a price point of $130 MSRP for the part, he continued leaking HD 6790 info throughout the week. Based on the Barts (HD 6870/50) chip and sporting 800 Stream Processors the 6790 is expected to split the difference between the HD 6770 (re-branded HD 5770) and the HD 6850. It will be interesting to see how the HD 6790 and Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 550 Ti match up due to their similarities in price and power consumption, so stay tuned.
AMD put out an excellent article explaining the MLAA feature that was introduced with the launch of the 68xx series of GPU’s. It seems that AMD is working on a more mature implementation of MLAA that can be controlled by developers, which is good news for those annoyed by it’s tendency to blur text in games like Starcraft 2.
In an update to the sparking GTX 590’s in last weeks article Jules of Kitguru reports that Nvidia has rushed out a BIOS revision because of the overclocked, and occasionally stock GTX 590’s exploding. Fuad Abazovic of Fudzilla managed to get a response from Nvidia to the effect that BIOS was fine and only one partner had released a new BIOS. It seems like the GTX 590 turning out to be a more dangerous and rare beast than most expected.
The Intel front also had some action this week with a couple of slide leaks covered by Semiaccurate’s own Lars-Göran Nilsson. It seems the next-gen chipsets from the blue camp are coming along quite nicely.
Microsoft put out a rather interesting article about the impact on power consumption that browsers have on laptops. Of course Microsoft’s newly released IE9 takes the cake in their testing, but FF4 shows some impressive results as well. Now if only other companies released canned benchmarks to show the superiority of their products… Oh, wait.
On the PC gaming front there’s been a bit of a stir with the recent release of Crysis 2. As most will probably recall somewhat fondly, one of the most popular questions to ask about a new GPU for the last few years has been, “But will it run Crysis?” This mentality is probably why the community has broken out the torches and pitchforks in response to Crysis 2 being a DX9 only game, instead of a modern DX11 game, or even a DX10 game like it’s predecessor. The list of grievances against Crysis 2 and it’s developer Crytek is best described by this article by john2 of DasReviews.
What happens in the Nvidia marketing department when you take the Ti out of GeForce GTX 560 Ti? You get a GF114 chip with a cluster disabled and 800Mhz plus core clock called the GTX 560. Chances are this card will slot in either between the HD 6850 and the HD 6870, or on top of the later. It depends on how close the tech sites follow Nvidia’s reviewers guide.
It looks like Visionary of VR-Zone got the drop on a slide from Nvidia detailing SLI support on AMD’s upcoming 990FX and 990X chipsets. It seems that even Nvidia are trying to get a cut of the profits from AMD’s upcoming high-end platform, I wonder what that says about Nvidia’s opinion of Bulldozer…S|A
Thomas Ryan
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