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As if the total defective NVIDIA GPU crisis couldn’t get any a good amount confusing, The Inquirer is now reporting the the original batch of bad GPUs may be far of the end of NVIDIA’s problems. Apparently, five unspecified team partners are now alleging the they’re seeing G92 and G94 chips anticipated bad at “high rates” as well, and in both desktop and laptop cards no less. That includes 8800GT, 8800GTS, 8800GS graphics cards, “several mobile flavors” of the 8800, “most” of the 9800 suffixes, and a few 9600 variants, all of that are established on the G92. As for the G94, it turns out the clearly card affected is the 9600GT. Of course, none of the present is approximately as set in stone as the original lot of problems, but we hold a sneaking suspicion currently will not be go on we hear up it.

NVIDIA’s so much pushing the GPU-as-CPU angle at SIGGRAPH currently year — we have currently witnessed the PhysX and CUDA-powered GeForce Power Pack for consumers, and the firm is too updating the Quadro Plex chain of Residual co-processors for workstation customers. The new Quadro Plex 2200 D2, calculated for sizeable datasets and models, manages information in two Quadro FX 5800 GPUs (totalling 480 CUDA cores) and 8GB of RAM, additonally the Quadro Plex 2100 D2 is optimized for substantial multidisplay rigs investing in one Quadro FX 4700 GPUs and substantiation for up to eight monitors. Sounds fun — and we are predicting the families who can justify the $10,500 appearing market value for these types of rigs imagine so too.

NVIDIA isn’t joking around when it says it’s after a dominant position in the consumer tech industry, and it’s apparently willing to take some aggressive steps to get there — like totally revamping its product lines. Speaking to Gamesindustry.biz, NVIDIA veep Roy Taylor (the same guy who said Intel was “dead”, you remember him), said that his company needed to “simplify the product line for consumers,” and that if NVIDIA is going to “widen our appeal, there’s no doubt we have to solve that problem.” No specific plans were offered, but might we suggest a moratorium on the random-numbers-and-letters product-naming scheme? Just a thought.

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Intel has been boasting of DirectX 10 support for its various integrated graphics options for some time now, but it’s only just recently gotten around to actually releasing a Vista driver that brings its GM965 and G35 Express chipsets up to speed. Of course, NVIDIA just couldn’t help itself from getting a few (more) digs in at Intel’s expense, and it’s now kindly provided a few benchmarks to show just how badly Intel’s integrated DirectX 10 solution stacks up against the bleeding-edge DirectX 10-ready games it now ostensibly supports. They couldn’t find a single game that was able to crank out more than 5 fps, even at a lowly 1280 x 1024 resolution and with the usual graphics intensive settings turned off. Then again, 4.4 fps in Crysis is pretty much par for the course.

Read - Crave, “Intel updates graphics with multimedia capabilities”
Read - Hardware Secrets, “Are Intel chipsets really capable of running DirectX 10 games?”

Alienware’s AMD-powered Aurora ALX picked up CrossFireX support just as soon as it went live from ATI, but it has taken a few weeks for the technology to make its way over to the iconic Area-51. Said gaming rig is now available with ATI CrossFireX, meaning that you can take advantage of all four GPUs across a pair of Radeon HD 3870 X2s. Full release posted after the jump.

HEATING THINGS UP – CROSSFIREX NOW OFFERED ON THE ALIENWARE AREA-51

For the first time, users can choose between the industry’s two dominant multi-GPU solutions on the same platform

Miami – April 28, 2008 – Alienware – the leading manufacturer of desktop, notebook and entertainment systems – now offers ATI CrossFireX™ on the Area-51® desktop computer. Alienware recently retooled and re-launched the Area-51, its flagship system, with NVIDIA® Quad SLI® graphics.

With four GPUs across dual graphics cards, CrossFireX cranks out not only intense, lifelike graphics but also the raw processing power necessary to manipulate and navigate real-time 3D environments for a never-before-seen gaming experience.

“This is huge,” says Marc Diana, Product Marketing Manager for Alienware. “One of the biggest reasons our customers choose Alienware is unmatched graphics performance. Adding a CrossFireX option to the award-winning Area-51 reaffirms its status as the world’s best gaming desktop.”

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Following up yesterday’s trash talk with a little action, NVIDIA has disclosed plans to create a sub-$45 processing platform which the GPU-maker is calling, “The World’s Most Affordable Vista Premium PC.” The architecture will combine VIA’s Isaiah processor with an integrated NVIDIA graphics chipset, which the company claims outperforms Intel’s Celeron-based, 945 IGP/ICH4 setup handily. Apparently, the combo is capable of 36 GFLOPS versus Intel’s 6.4GFLOPS — which we shouldn’t have to tell you is a ton of GFLOPS. We’re excited about the prospect of better performance in an integrated chipset (we’ve all suffered at the hands of the GMA950), but we don’t want to see this end in a back-alley knife fight. Keep your cool, guys.

source:engadget