According to the information Nvidia released, Fermi is going to be a geometry powerhouse and it will also do much better than the HD 5870 at tessellation. I think those of you are that are smarter than me will really be impressed by the fundamental design, so give this stuff a read.

For those of you who likes them newfangled video thingys, check these legit Fermi videos out. On that page Kyle does not say they are authentic, but he does say that on the bottom of this page.

There is now a sub $100 5,000 series video card available from ATI. According to the press release, a single HD 5670 has enough power to allow gaming on three displays using Eyefinity. If true, that is amazing. I will need to find a review that tests that assertion before I accept it as fact.

This release has occured at a very inconvenient time for me so I will not have enough time to get the necessary work done until Saturday. Perhaps by then there will be more than one HD 5670 model for sale on Newegg.

This is going to be a very short post due to the fact that I lost the original post that I worked on for about an hour because Nvidia's website crashed my browser. They are having problems with their News page due to CES I guess...

The only thing mentioned in the press conference that you folks would be interested in is that GF100 (Fermi) is "in volume production, ramping very hard and you can get a sneak peak of it here at CES." They also introduced 3D Vision Surround which is three 120Hz monitors arranged in a horizontal fashion. It is obvious that 3D Vision Surround is meant to combat ATI's Eyefinity technology.  

I am hoping that some more GPU related stories will come out of this year's CES, and if they do you can be sure that I will post them here for your reading pleasure.

Tweak News photographed a functioning Fermi engineering sample at Nvidia's booth.

Overclockers Club has a nice article detailing the future of 3D Vision that I found pretty interesting. Since I already have a 120Hz PC monitor and the 3D Vision glasses kit, I am in a pretty good position when it comes to watching 3D Blu-rays next year. I think I might get rid of my elderly DVD drive for a drive that can play 3D Blu-ray discs. I have also been thinking about getting a newer 120Hz HDTV that will allow me to use 3D Vision on a larger scale. If this 3D Blu-ray technology becomes a reality for me, you will be able to read all about my impressions right here.

When I went looking for a 3D Vision graphic to post here, I noticed that there are a lot more 3D Vision Test Drive Centers than there used to be. You can now try 3D Vision for yourself at 38 locations in 20 different states, so give it a go and tell us what you think.

UPDATE: Apparently "40 million homes" will have 3D TVs by 2014.

I will be attending Control Point Con 3 (CP Con 3) from December 31st through January 3rd in Huntsville Alabama. Control Point is a very popular Team Fortress 2 podcast created by the Dead Workers Party. I am an important member of the CP community and close friends with the hosts of Control Point. I'm also a host of the Left 4 Dead podcast for DWP called the Safe House.

Anyhoo, this Con will consist of LAN gaming, board gaming, Rock Band/DJ Hero/Guitar Hero gaming, an open mic night, a Rock Band contest and a farewell dinner. I will also be giving 3D Vision demonstrations of games like Left 4 Dead 2, Resident Evil 5 and Batman Arkham Asylum. Besides myself you can also meet Joe Hills and Art Frederick, the creators of Jack of all Blades, Ash Williams of Dumb Blonde, Dead , Shannon Saar the creator of the Wighthouse comic and the four totally awesome hosts of Control Point.

If you are near Huntsville or Alabama you should consider dropping by. You can hang out and have a great time for free, but if you want a schwag bag and if you want to attend the dinner, then it will cost you $6.00. If you are interested in this shindig, then you should join the Dead Workers Party forums where we are all talking about the Con.

The hotel the attendees are staying at is the Holiday Inn in downtown Huntsville. Most of the Con happens at Lowe Mill which is a very short drive from the hotel.

I am so engrossed by Left 4 Dead 2 right now that the launch of the HD 5970 has snuck up on me and it has bitten me on my ass. There is a large chunk missing from my metaphorical ass right now.

Even though Left 4 Dead 2 is like the most fun ever, I am going to add the reviews and cards to the site tonight before I allow myself to be entertained by my zombie murder simulator.

UPDATE: I have added all the cards and reviews that I could find. Now I get to go play.

I was just adding this watercooled Powercolor HD 5870 to our system when I noticed that Newegg has implemented a new product viewing system. The horizontal slider rotates the product and you can also zoom in on the product at any angle. The zoom is almost powerful enough to allow you to read the small print on the PCB. Here are some products that feature this new stuff:

Powercolor HD 5870 LCS

Evga GT 220

XFX HD 5750

Galaxy GT 220

Sapphire HD 5750

I wanted to post about this on Monday when I found the card in our parser, but I've been way too busy at work. I am totally posting about it now though! Evga has constructed a GTX 275 that features an added GTS 250 core for PhysX processing duties. This is a very unique thing to do and while I do think it is pretty cool, it makes the job of adding this card to our database harder. When creating a new reference card in out database we can only enter one GPU model for it. So the only thing I can do is add the card to our GTX 275 list and enter (+GTS 250 core) in the card name.

If you're interested in trying this card out for yourself, you can pre-order it now from Evga for $349.99. This one of a kind card comes with a coupon for a free copy of the totally sweet Batman Arkham Asylum game for the PC as well.

PC Perspective Article

I was on vacation yesterday (I had the day off from work) so I was kinda surprised to see that I had three new cards to the site today. This morning I got all my work on the HD 5770 and HD 5750 completely done and I setup the GT216 chip, GT 200 series and I created the GT 220 page. Now I am about to start adding the GT 220 cards, reviews, and Newegg links. It's not easy to balance my work on the site with the work I do at my real job, but I do it all for you dear readers.

The shiny Sapphire HD 5750:

Here's your HD 5850 overclocking results. Congrats to the team at Guru3D (once again) for their stunning victory. They almost managed to get the HD 5850 to the reference HD 5870 speeds.

Looks like the HD 5850 reviews are hitting the presses today. I'll get as many as I can linked up on this page right now, and later I'll post another overclocking roundup. I bet this overclocking roundup will be very interesting.

[H]ard|OCP has a pretty nice video review of AMD's Eyefinity tech and seeing as how I am a very visually oriented person, it really caught my attention. I was not being sarcastic Mr. Cutter when I said "Color me excited and intrigued." Did the [H] dig it? Perhaps...

Apparently since the 186 GeForce drivers, Nvidia has disabled PhysX processing if an AMD video card is being used for the graphics processing. That is just not cool at all. I agree with Unknown-One's statement, "Ok, so don't support it, but don't go out of your way to disable it!". If this was my decision, I would make sure that PhysX works very well in this configuration so that the user can see the value in my company's technology. Perhaps then the user might be presuaded to buy a video card from Nvidia the next time around. What do you guys think?

Here is Nvidia’s customer care center entry about this situation:

Nvidia supports GPU accelerated Physx on NVIDIA GPUs while using NVIDIA GPUs for graphics. NVIDIA performs extensive Engineering, Development, and QA work that makes Physx a great experience for customers. For a variety of reasons - some development expense some quality assurance and some business reasons NVIDIA will not support GPU accelerated Physx with NVIDIA GPUs while GPU rendering is happening on non- NVIDIA GPUs.

It's the headless body of Spiro Agnew!

Here's your HD 5870 overclocking results. Congrats to the team at Guru3D for their stunning victory.

Ah launch day. How I have missed thee. It has been almost 5 months since the last video card launch we covered (the HD 4770). Well AMD is back bitches! And by the looks of these reviews, they have succeeded in raising the bar in several graphical areas while also using less power than the HD 4890!

I have the HD 5870 and HD 5850 pages up and I have added all the cards and reviews that I could find at the moment. I have not had time to read through many reviews yet but I have a few things I would like to share with you. Check out the comparison pics at the top of this page. The HD 5870 has drawn an almost perfect circle all the way through the rainbow tunnel of happiness! TechPowerUp created a seconday article about how the HD 5870 handles decreased PCI-E bandwidth. And finally Hexus and TweakTown were able to do some CrossFireX testing.

Sometime later today I will put together an overclocking roundup and I will also get some Newegg links connected.

I enjoyed them, perhaps you will as well.

I was looking at the parser today hoping to find some HD 5870 or 5850 stuff when I came across the Evga GTX 285 Classified. I noticed that it had some interesting features like "Worlds First 4-Way SLI Card, X-Cool Switch for Extreme OC Mode, Supports EVGA's EVbot, Supports EVGA's EVbot, and Dedicated Voltage Read Points." So I dug a little deeper and I located a page that explained this wacky 4-way SLI business. On that page you can also watch a slideshowesque 'video' of the world record attempt and the 3DMark scores themselves.

If you enjoy spending lots of money in order to look at really big numbers, then this card and motherboard setup is for you.

DigiTimes wants us all to know that AMD will be releasing the HD 5850 and HD 5870 on September 22. One month later AMD will unleash the beast that will be known as 5870 X2.

While we wait for our planet to spin around a few more times, we can read some of these benchmarks. Here are the numbers for the HD 5850 vs the GTX 285, the HD 5870 vs GTX 295 and HD 5870 CrossFire vs GTX 295 SLI.

Yes I have returned, and no, I am not infected with the Swine Flu. I did however talk to a person at the Nvidia booth (I would like to put his name here, but I misplaced his business card) about some things.

I asked them if they are going to continue to market the 3D Vision bundle and kit or if they are going to market the 3D Vision driver that you can use with the cheapo red and blue glasses. Currently, Nvidia is going to continue to push both implementations. The guy also agreed that it is difficult to convince customers that 3D Vision is awesome if they can't try it for themselves before they buy it.

He showed me the PC version of Resident Evil 5 in 3D Vision and it was awesome! Like WoW, RE5 has out of screen effects (zomg that knife is flying at my face!) programmed into it which makes me salivate. I also got to see Batman Arkham Asylum being played with PhysX support turned on. I have been playing it on the 360 and I have to admit that it was cool to see the wall chunks that Bane throws at you crumble and then stay on the ground. There was also a level with big stacks of paper that could be exploded or pushed over in a realistic manner. When I returned from my trip I had an email from Nvidia offering me review copies of both games (sweeet!), so I will be able to check both of them out pretty soon I guess.

In other news, there is this Radeon Eyefinity Technology. Six 30" monitors powered by one 'Evergreen' card and 24 30" monitors powered by 4 sounds pretty cool you guys. Color me excited and intrigued.