Let’s be honest, your PC could probably be upgraded. Whether you’re rocking a top of the line rig, or your scrapping together from the ground up, the thought of a new video card is tempting. Well, the folks at Nvidia are making your decision a little easier by offering some sweet promos with their most popular cards.
Did you stay up to the wee hours of the morning waiting to unlock Battlefield 3? If not, now is a good time to remind you that you'll want to update your graphics drivers on your PC for the game. Both AMD and NVIDIA have released optimized versions of their drivers for DICE's Frostbite 2 engine. I put a solid 3 hours into the campaign last night on my PC armed with a GeForce GTX 580 on all Ultra settings and the latest drivers. The game is drop dead gorgeous for sure and makes serious use of lighting effects with some really slick texture details.
While the Battlefield 3 beta won't contain any co-op, it is a good chance to get a feel for the game and check out the Battle Log online system. The multiplayer beta for Battlefield 3 kicks off tomorrow on the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC, and while the former two won't require any manual intervention to run other than downloading it, you might want to get your PC in shape today by updating your drivers.
NVidia have just launched a brand new website for their GeForce line of video cards to help you get the most out of your investment in its PC hardware.
It's been an age long battle in the PC gaming world. ATI vs. NVidia. Not since the early days of 3DFX and the birth of the 3D acclerator card has there been two steadfast competitors for consumer hardware dollars. Sadly that battle is about to change again, after AMD's purchase of ATI in 2006, many wondered what would happen to the graphics maker. Since that time ATI has managed to snag over 50% of the discrete graphics market share with it's 5000 series of cards, mostly due to NVidia's rough showing of its FERMI series of processors.
While EVGA has had a CO-OP line of video cards for a while now, their latest edition to the dual GPU lineup is something a bit unique. Instead of allowing SLI on a single card like most of the other co-op cards, the GTX 275 CO-OP uses a GTX 275 GPU for graphics and a GTS 250 GPU for PhysX support. PhysX allows the GPU to do advance physics processing and effects.
The above screen is the first shot from EA's Battleforge that shows off the game's DirectX 11 support. The game's developer and EA have announced that Battleforge is the first game to feature DX11 support, though you'll still need a DX11 card to take advantage of that. Currently only Radeon 5870 and 5850 cards support it.
Alienware was busy at the Tokyo Game show this week, announcing a new mobile version of their M17x gaming laptop called the M15x. The 15" model sports many of the same features as its bigger brother, sacrificing a second video card, some ports, and screen size. That's not to say it can't hold its own, as the laptop is the first one to support Intel's new Core i7 processor. The laptop starts at a $1499 price tag.
Stardock and NVIDIA have announced a brand new version of Impulse today. Dubbed the "NVIDIA Edition," it will provide NVIDIA graphics card owners seamless driver updates and other optimizations for their PC.
I've been a PC gamer for over 20 years now, and building systems just as long. The one thing that's never changed in all that time is the difficulty that goes into the decision of buying a new piece of hardware for your computer. This is part of the reason companies like Alienware, Dell, and HP do so well at selling pre-built computers.
