Not much going on in the word of video cards lately... The biggest news related to video cards is that I have just signed up for Twitter. So now you can totally follow along as I live my totally fascinating life. I will find out if Mike has a Twitter account (I am almost sure he does) and I will link it here.

ATI is settling a lawsuit related to their false claims of HDCP compatibility, which means that many people could be eligible for some free video cards. If you purchased a video card that was made by ATI (not Sapphire, VisionTek, Asus etc.) between January 1, 2003 to March 31, 2006 you should totally submit your authorized claim.

Here is the nitty gritty:

You are a class member if, while residing in the United States, you purchased for your own personal use and not for resale an ATI graphics card (that means a card built by or for ATI, not by or for another company such as Asus, Diamond, Gigabyte, Palit, Sapphire, or VisionTek) from one of the following series: Radeon 9550; Radeon 9800; Radeon x700; Radeon x800; Radeon x850; Radeon x1300; Radeon x1600; Radeon x1800; Radeon x1900; All-in-Wonder 9800; All-in-Wonder 2006; All-in-Wonder x600; All-in-Wonder x800; All-in-Wonder x1800; All-in-Wonder x1900; or any FireGL or FireMV series of graphics cards. You must have made your purchase during the period from January 1, 2003 to March 31, 2006.

What does the settlement provide?

If 55,500 or fewer authorized claims are submitted, each authorized claimant will receive one Radeon 4650 512MB PCI express graphics card for each authorized claim they submit. If greater than 55,500, but less than 71,501, authorized claims are submitted, each authorized claimant will receive one Radeon 2400 256MB PCI express graphics card for each authorized claim he or she submits.

If greater than 71,500 authorized claims are submitted, each authorized claimant will receive a cash payment in the amount of his or her pro rata share of $3,000,000. For example, if the total number of authorized claims is 71,501, each authorized claimant will receive a check in the amount of $41.95 for each authorized claim he or she submits. The amount of any potential cash payment thus will vary depending on the number of authorized claims.

Yesterday Nvidia sent me an email with a link to this site. I looked at it briefly and I was confused about the red and blue glasses the page mentions. The 3D Vision I am familar with does not use red and blue glasses. Well this article at PC Perspective explains it all.

Remember when I said:

"...is the 3D gaming experience that GeForce 3D Vision provides worth the price? Well that really depends on the person. If you have enough money to buy it (without destroying your budget) and you have tried it for yourself then you could probably justify the cost."

Well apparently Nvidia has realized that $598 dollars (they dropped the price by $1!) is way too much money to spend on something that you can't appreciate until you try it. 

The original “red/blue” method of producing a stereo 3D image is called “anaglyph” and is able to give each eye its own image by superimposing each frame of a video with a different color hue.  The viewer then wears correctly tinted glasses that filter out every other frame so that each is presented with a unique view.  Unfortunately the dramatic tinting of the image is nearly impossible for the brain to remove completely and thus seeing any kind of high quality content in this format was not acceptable.

Maybe my 3D Vision gear will become a collectors item...and maybe this is why Nvidia is letting me keep the 3D Vision hardware they sent me...

You may have noticed that it has been a while since I posted a story. There are two reasons for this. I was on vacation from May 21-26th and I was without Internet access and I have not really seen anything worth posting. Well I am back from vacation and I just found something worth posting. Hurray!

[H]ard|Forum member Haste266's 8800 GTX was showing definite signs of death so he decided to treat it like a "baked potato". After baking it for 8-10 minutes at 385F and letting it air cool, he had a fixed 8800 GTX. Apparently the heat from the oven re-melted some solder joints that were failing.

It is a good thing that the 8800 GTX (like almost all recent card) are RoHS compliant. If it was not, there could have been some pretty toxic gases coming off the card.

Congrats Haste266! You are officially a neat person.

While this is pretty awesome news, I can't help but feel like AMD is trying to attract some attention (and some dollars) with this stunt. I think they are hoping that 1GHz graphics cards may entice apathetic buyers into purchasing the HD 4890 instead of waiting for the next wave. According to the release, Sapphire, XFX, Asus and TUL (PowerColor) will be the first manufacturers to get the new HD 4890 in stores.

The more popular and well known attention whore picture is a little too NSFW, but that won't stop me from linking to it...

This is still a work in progress but I think you guys'll dig it. There are some things that are not there (or working) yet. 

1. There will be a graph below the popularity graph that shows the price fluculations over time. The x-axis for both graphs will match so that you can see how the price and popularity change together.

2. The Multi-GPU button is not there yet.

3. Posting comments on the new pages is not ready yet.

4. The Frequently Compared Cards box (top right) will have tabs for Frequently Compared, Family, GPU, Price Range, and Release Year.

Now that is out of the way, let me show you something that is working. **Clicking on a card name will no longer take you to the manufacturer's page. Instead you will get a popup box that looks something like this:

This popup contains the card name, model number, the manufacturer (clicking on this will take you to the manufacturer's page for the card), the picture for the card, and then all the information that we have for the card in our database.

**The popup will not appear if you have sorted the card list. It will work in the future of course, but this is a bug for now.

One more thing. We encourage you to post feedback about this work in progress in the comments for this story. Be nice please. Mike works so hard...

Now that we can actually install and play Broken Steel on the PC, I though it might be a good idea to point out these new Nvidia drivers that improve performance when using antialiasing. Fallout 3 is one of those games that really does benefit from antialiasing so make sure to download these drivers and turn that AA on or up.

Here is the PC games improvement list for the GeForce 185.85 drivers:

Accelerates performance in several 3D applications. The following are examples of improvements measured with Release 185 drivers vs. Release 182 drivers (results will vary depending on your GPU, system configuration, and game settings):

So what good is a GPU when it is placed on a PCB that has no display connections? Well apparently it is good enough to run the European Extremely Large Telescope project.

And by "on sale" I mean that they are selling it. You can buy the sweet-ass Black Edition (with the special weapon style packaging and the touch sensitve AirForce Panel) for a paltry $294.00. That is only $120 more than this MSI GTX 260 that operates at the same clock speeds.

Have at it y'all.

It was very important for me to include a new column in this overclocking roundup. The Catalyst Control Center was limiting reviewers to 830/3,400 and according to [H]ard|OCP:

Every third party utility we tried did not work yet with this video card. There is potential here just waiting to come out.

Guru3D was able to make use of an internal beta version of Rivatuner since they are the ones who develop the tool, and TechPowerUp used a successor to ATI Tool (whatever that means). Please take note of the massive (25-38%) memory overclocks on these cards. Apparently the GDDR5 memory chips are rated at 4,000MHz officially, but it is understood that they can go even higher.

Late last night I noticed that four HD 4770s appeared on Newegg and I knew what that meant. It meant that today would be launch day. At this point I have added the RV740 chip and the HD 4770 to the database and I have hooked up the four models that Newegg has in stock. I will be adding more card and reviews to the database all day long so stay tuned.

In the meantime, here are some handy Newegg links for your consuming pleasure:

You heard that right. This GTX 260 is of such high quality that the men and women of the US Military can rely on it. MSI has a press release and a mini site up for the NGTX260 Lighting, but here's a list of the features that are really worth mentioning.

[H]ard|Forum member Stanley Pain RMAed his BFG 8800 GTX and received a 1GB 9800 GT OC in exchange. He wasn't quite sure this was an equal trade so he decided to ask his [H]ard|Forum brethren. A person named Crosshairs then posted a comparison link from GPUReview.com (Thanks man!) to illustrate the bandwidth and pixel fill rate differences between the two cards.

What happened then you ask? Well Jeff.Kozlowski, the [H]ard|Forum BFG Support rep stepped in to turn Stanley's frown upside down:

In our review we mentioned how important it is for people to try 3D Vision out before they can develop an interest in it. Well I was toolin' around the 3D Vision pages at Nvidia's site and I noticed that several more test drive centers are open now. Even better, some of these places are in the US! California even! Apparently some store called Central Computers is the exclusive US retail 3D Vision demo store. Which is shame since they have only 4 stores, all of which are in Claifornia.

Well hold on. They say that they are "The only Bay Area stores with this demo" and then they also say "WE ARE THE ONLY RETAIL STORES THAT HAVE THIS DEMO". I hope that only the first claim is true because it is my firm belief that 3D Vision test drive centers need to be spread across our great land. From sea to shining sea as it were.

I have some good news for those of you that live in the South Eastern United States by the way. From May 22-25 I will be in Birmingham Alabama attending Play On Con. But wait there's more! I will have all my GeForce 3D Vision gear with me. If you guys are interested in checking it out at the con, send me a message using our contact form or leave me your email address in a comment (I will remove your email address before I approve your comment).

On our card pages we have a column labeled with "DS" which stands for dual slot. The purpose of this column is to let our readers know if a video card occupies 2 slots. But what does "occupies 2 slots" really mean? I have identified three different kinds of configurations which I think COULD be decribed as dual slot. There are cards that take up two expansion slots on your case that are also 2 slots thick (GTX 295, GTX 285, HD 4870 X2 etc...). These types of cards are dual slot in every sense of the word.

Then there are the two designs shown below. The top is a watercooled HD 4890 from PowerColor. It has a dual height connector plate, but the waterblock on this card is only 1 slot thick. Should this be classified as a dual slot card? I am inclined to say yes. Unless you remove the top part of the connector plate (the vent) you will not be able to install a card directly below it.

The blue card at the bottom is a HD 4670 from HIS. It has a one slot connector plate, a one slot heatsink on the GPU side (not shown) and then a one slot blue heatsink on the top of the card. Technically this card does take up two slots inside the case but normally people are concerned with the thickness of the cooler on the GPU side only. I do not currently label these type of cards as dual slot cards. Do you guys think I should? Let me know in the comments section.

PS

When the new site is ready I think it might be a good idea to change the DS column to allow for numerical values since some cards are 3 slots thick now. 1 would be the default value of course.

ByGamerForGamer has posted a video showing 17 of the eventual 23 GTX 295s that he installed into his server rig. I have not viewed the video yet (YouTube is blocked where I am) but I hear that it is pretty hot. Literally. That many GTX 295s will melt your eye parts off.

I wonder if this is gonna be one of those OnLive servers that will allow me to play Crysis on my laptop...

Back when I posted the HD 4870 overclocking round up, I thought that GDDR5 at 4,400MHz was "shiek". Well now 4,800Mhz is all the rage.

Those memory overclocks are really impressive, but the GTX 275 has a higher average core overclock, and it has the shader overclock going for it as well.

I have gotten the HD 4890 stuff all squared away but I am going to have to work on the GTX 275 when I get home tonight. I also want to post an overclocking round-up for both cards, so look for that tonight as well.

UPDATE:

I got the GTX 275 stuff all taken care of now. Here are the requisite Nvidia GTX 275 and AMD HD 4890 links.

This is not a joke. The pages are up and they look like they are actually fully filled out. We have the GTX 275 model GV-N275UD-896H and the HD 4890 model GV-R489-1GH-B. Once we get all the information we need to create the GTX 275 and HD 4890 entries, I can add these to the database.

Here are pics even!

You heard it here first kids! Nvidia and AMD have officially dropped out of the consumer video card business after both companies realized that OnLive will soon make all gaming PCs obsolete. OnLive is the hot story from this year's Game Developer Conference. GDC may be over but Joystiq just posted the first part of their interview with Steve Perlman (OnLive's founder) in which he stated that he wants people to be skeptical. 

Consumers may be skeptical, but Nvidia and AMD are smart enough to know when they should bow out gracefully to a better product and solution. Both companies have scrapped their plans for their next generation of cards and they have also halted all of their driver development. All of the employees working on video card hardware and software have been let go, but many have been able to get higher paying gigs at Rearden.

Nvidia and AMD have both brought down their official sites in order to remove all the pages associated with their failed video card products. The redesigned sites are expected to be back soon so keep checking the following links:

www.nvidia.com

www.amd.com