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January 12, 2012 - NVIDIA CES Day 3 Recap - Tegra 3 Whirlwind Continues NVIDIA's sums up day 3 at CES. Read more at their blog here.

Propaganda Wrapup - 2/03/12 @ 7:26 pm - By: MikeC - Source: Email

Presenting this week's propoganda round-up from the Green team. In This Issue: AMD released Radeon 7900 Series reviews and their drivers were weak. Notebook GPUs are on the rise, and Windows 8 and Intel Ivy Bridge should stoke that fire. Drivers Made The Difference NVIDIA is proud of our reputation of having rock-solid drivers. Be it on desktop or notebook GPUs, these drivers are stable. "NVIDIA also regularly updates the drivers for the GeForce graphics cards in order to deliver the best possible performance with the latest games, so it's possible the GTX 580M will deliver even better performance after a future update." "NVIDIA platforms continue to be the Gold Standard at Id Software for quality, performance, and support." - John Carmack NVIDIA GPUs give you uncompromising drivers and we throw in some added features. "While NVIDIA leverages major benefits like a better mobile driver program and Optimus graphics switching technology, as well as corner cases with PhysX, CUDA, and 3D Vision ..." Drivers issues have plagued our competition for some time. The recent launch of AMD's Radeon 7950 and 7970 GPUs made this apparent. "Instead, we seem to have found a fault with the AMD drivers and its QA program. The problem of not seeing any scaling at 2560x1600 in Battlefield 3 (and ONLY 2560x1600) while seeing no scaling in Batman: Arkham City, crashes at 2560x1600 in Skyrim and the large dips in frame rate in Deus Ex: Human Revolution are pretty dramatic and damning for the brand new architecture." Your GPU is only as good as your driver team. "We still don't have a finalized driver for the Radeon HD 7900 series, but AMD tells us we should see one when Catalyst 12.3 rolls around, in March, of 2012..., just to be clear. That's a bit too long in our opinion to be dealing with beta drivers for your flagship video cards. The Radeon HD 7970 was announced on December 22nd, and made available on January 9th. Now the Radeon HD 7950 is available on the 31st. Drivers are fragmented right now. That is over a month in and we are still running beta drivers, with the outlook being two more months before we have a solid driver. We have to ask ourselves, What the hell is Ben Bar-Haim, VP of Software at AMD, doing? Please Ben, don't screw up some of the best silicon AMD has ever produced. AMD has a new CEO over there that needs to be aware too. Hey Rory! Did you know you were running a GPU business that is losing its highest end customers based on nothing but AMD's lacking software and execution thereof? CrossFireX needs attention please! This confusion called driver support needs attention please!" If you spend money on two graphics cards, you darn well expect them to work. "AMD still has work to do with CrossFireX. We aren't impressed with our 7900 series experiences to date with CrossFireX in any form. Radeon HD 7950 CrossFireX is a mixed bag." You Can Take It With You From notebooks to handheld devices, the mobile computing segment is hot right now. NVIDIA recently snatched up a landslide of notebook design wins, thanks in part to the Intel Sandy Bridge and the must-have NVIDIA Optimus. Notebook sales are expected to continue to rise with Intel Ivy Bridge right around the corner. "Another growth driver for the notebook industry in the second half will be Intel's 22nm Ivy Bridge platform, which will feature Intel's 3D Tri-Gate technology with power consumption to reduce by 50% from the existing 32nm processors." NVIDIA Optimus technology delivers great battery life and great performance when you need it. We like our outlook for Ivy Bridge attach rates: "At the core is this issue: will notebooks use chips that isolate graphics for fast performance. The folks at Raymond James say Nvidia (NVDA) is seeing a material uptick in design win momentum from the Ivy Bridge chip notebook platforms, which employ a discrete graphics processing unit (GPU) vs Sandy Bridge, a hybrid chip. And, they say graphic processing unit (GPU) attach rates will remain stable for the next several years." Another big driver for notebooks will be Windows 8, and Windows running on ARM processors like NVIDIA Tegra. "Windows 8 is stable on the ARM chip platform and will be seeded to developers soon, sources told CNET. Devices may be priced significantly less than their Intel counterparts, too. Windows 8 on ARM should go to developers in February, said one source, who had some hands-on time with a high-profile device from a major PC maker, adding that Windows 8 was impressive and stable." Look for big news around Ivy Bridge and Windows 8 later this year. "While at this year's CES, we received a tip from an unnamed source that there were Kepler GPUs located in some Samsung laptops on the floor. So, we decided to go and check it out for ourselves and surprisingly enough, there were indeed some Mobile 600 series GPUs." OK, real soon.