NVidia has released new ForceWare drivers for the GeForce range of videocards, adding support for the GeForce 6500 and optimizing SLI support. Full release notes are here.

This press release announces that Ageia, of the PhysX chip and SDK, has bought Swedish physics middleware developer Meqon. Technology by Meqon was being used in Duke Nukem Forever and TimeShift. In this post on the 3D Realms forums George Broussard comments he hadn't heard this would happen, and also mentions he's not looking forward to changing to a different SDK if it comes to that.

NVidia sends along word that new drivers are now available for nForce 4 powered AMD motherboards. There are drivers for Windows XP/2000, Windows XP 64-bit and Windows Server 2003 x64.

Forgot about this one yesterday; the latest Firefox is now out, fixing a few security issues. Thanks inchwide. For those of you hot for the new rendering engine Deer Park Alpha 2 is out.

The deal made between Valve and ATI, where new RADEON cards came with a voucher for a free copy of Half-Life 2, was definitely beneficial for both parties, but what were the terms of the deal? The Inquirer claims they have the facts.

ATI gave Valve $2.4 million in cash for the deal. ATI also invested $1.2 million in marketing this great game. And last, but not least, was a cool $4.4 million that ATI and its partners spent for bundles.

Even with the year-long delay, the deal still worked out for ATI who were selling RADEON cards like crazy for gamers who wanted the free copy of Half-Life 2, especially since Valve didn't come out with news of a delay until very close to the now infamous September release date. However, this only ignited the craze of "the way it's meant to be played" which only confuses consumers into thinking they need to switch video cards for the latest game. Sadly, it does happen.

Ahhhhh its good to see some good old fashion piss fighting between big companies. AMD has filed a suit against Intel for Antitrust saying that Intel was naughty instead of nice.

The suit, filed Monday in U.S. District Court in Delaware, alleges Intel has bullied 38 companies, including large-scale computer-makers, wholesale distributors and retailers, to secure a monopoly in the highly competitive x86 microprocessor market. [snip] In March, Japan's anti-monopoly watchdog, the Fair Trade Commission, issued a warning to Intel, saying that the company was curbing competition in the microprocessor chip market by pressuring Japanese clients to buy its chips.

Over at Gaming Nexus you can find the latest AGEIA Q&A, makers of the PhysX physics chip and NovodeX SDK. VP Andy Keane answers questions about development time required, platform support, pricing, comparisons to the Havok engine, PCI-Express support and more.

It's okay if you don't know what HDR lighting stands for or why it's important to Half-Life 2: Lost Coast; it's a relatively new idea that's now garnering some major press. Luckily for you, Bit-tech.net did an extensive overview of the tech and provided plenty of screenshots to show off its benefits. HDR stands for High Dynamic Range and its being touted as the next big thing in visual realism for gaming.

HDR facilitates the use of colour values way outside the normal range in an effort to produce a more realistic rendering of a typical 3D scene. If you have ever driven through a dark tunnel in your car, and then emerged out the other side into blazing sunshine, temporarily blinded by the difference in light levels - that oversaturation is one example of what is possible with HDR

Valve has been working on a showcase level called Lost Coast that is supposed to make dramatic use of HDR. However, at this point, it is a performance-hog, so enabling it even on high-powered rigs can bring the action to a crawl. Still, you can see it in motion with the 1.3 patch of Far Cry (media here) and in these incredibly stylistic shots of HL2 characters placed in real-life photography.

At this past E3, both Sony and Microsoft disclosed quite a bit of technical information regarding their next-gen consoles, giving us a more accurate picture of how powerful these new machines will be. Still, the casual gamer probably doesn't understand what's so important 300 million transistors or what the benefits are of a multi-core processor. Luckily, sites around the web have posted their own in-depth technical analyses of these consoles.

For starters, Ars Technica has two separate pieces taking a look inside the Xbox 360. The first article focuses on the procedural synthesis techniques, or "making optimal use of system bandwidth and main memory by dynamically generating lower-level geometry data from statically stored higher-level scene data." Their second article dives deep into the multi-core processor and how it relates to the topic of the first piece.

Tackling the PlayStation 3 is Real Tech News who explain what's so special about the vaunted Cell processor and how it's quite possible that it can be found in a lot of your home entertainment devices and not just the PS3. As for the PS3's RSX graphics processor, developed by nVidia, not much has been revealed but nVidia is set to talk about all their upcoming chips on Tuesday of next week, so we should know more then.

New on GameCloud this morning is a Q&A with Robert Krakoff, president of mouse manufacturer Razer. Questions are about their new products and plans for the future.

Sony's Ken Kutaragi, whose company is pushing Blu-Ray and will use it in the PlayStation 3, has said that the possibility of a merger between the two next-gen disc formats are "almost none. It's very difficult." As you may recall, talks have been underway for some time now to unify the format to prevent a war that would only hurt everyone involved.

Both sides have highlighted the problems in creating a unified standard for the discs, which use a blue laser to read and record information. Blu-ray's recording layer is located 0.1mm from the surface of the disc, compared with 0.6mm for HD DVD. "With the dialogue focusing on 0.1 and 0.6, there is no way for the two sides to divide things fairly," Kutaragi said.

As for the other side of the fence, Toshiba's president Tadashi Okamura has said a merger could still be possible but won't come until after both formats have hit store shelves. "We may actually have a situation where merchandise from both sides is put on store shelves. But the market would not allow that situation to last very long," he said.

Just in case you missed it, Apple revealed that they are ditching the IBM PowerPC processor and switching over to Intel-based systems. It's a pretty big deal that has surprised, shocked, and scared many consumers and developers. Inside Mac Games contacted a handful of Mac game developers and got their reactions on the deal.

Peter Tamte, MacSoft/Destineer:
We think Apple's move to Intel is great. For one thing, it demonstrates that Apple is really serious about giving Windows-based computing head-to-head competition. And, for another, it's going to narrow the gap between the release of a game on Windows and the release on Mac -- maybe to zero.
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Brian Greenstone - Pangea Software:
Once Windows runs natively on a Mac there won't be any reason for publishers to make Mac-specific versions of their warez anymore. It's going to totally kill the Mac game porting industry and probably have serious implications on original content developers like me.

There's also a huge piece by Ryan Gordan, Epic Games' cross platform developer. He covers a lot of ground, saying many middleware packages such as Havok have no excuse to not work on a Mac and the switch enables PC and Mac gamers to play together online and swap their game files.

NVidia plans to unveil their next-gen graphics chip at an event in San Francisco on June 21. The event will be an "evening of full-throttle entertainment" with "revolutionary technologies, hot 3D content, and exciting gaming action as we unveil our next-generation GPU."

This desktop GPU will be very similar to the one they've designed for the PS3, dubbed the RSX or Reality Synthesizer, which has been said to be more powerful than two combined GeForce 6800 Ultras. The RSX has a 550MHz core clock and 300 million transistors, but both Sony and nVidia have been mum on other features.

Update: Some pictures of the new card have shown up at Tom's Hardware and AnandTech. Tom's is calling it the GeForce 7800 GTX.

The engineers over at Gigabyte have been working on a new motherboard solution that would support four PCIe video cards at the same time. Currently, the standard is no more than two at once via nVidia's SLI solution, but apparently Gigabyte has found a way to get two of the SLI chipsets running at the same time.

It appears that the company has made significant progress, as the first picture of such a solution has reached our offices. The board, currently named "GA-8N-SLI Quad", shows four PCI Express slots that can be occupied by SLI-compatible graphics cards. According to sources, Gigabyte found a way to combine two nForce4 SLI chipsets on one platform. Interestingly, the board integrates two different versions of the chipset - the nForce4 SLI Intel Edition (Crush 19) represents the Northbridge, the version for AMD processors is used as Southbridge.

The article isn't clear of the possible performance increase that four cards would represent. As reported earlier, ATI is also working on a multi-card solution. Read about that here.

Hexus.net posted the first details on ATI's dual-card technology, dubbed Multi Video Processing units (MVP). The first card that will take advantage of MVP will be the PCIe Radeon X850 XT, which Hexus speculates will be shipping in the near future. The neat thing behind ATI's MVP tech is that you don't have to pair cards of the same model. As long as the two cards are MVP compatible, they'll work together. For instance, you buy the X850 XT in a couple months. Then two years later you buy ATI's latest and greatest, the "X1050 XT." Don't throw out the old card, just set it as the slave to the X1050 XT and you're good to go with MVP!

Nothing kinky here folks, the "Master/Slave" reference tells you which card is in control of assembling the final image in its frame buffer. Just like NVIDIA SLi, the ATi MVP solution will require a compatible mainboard (first seen by HEXUS on the ASUSTeK booth at this years CeBIT exhibition) and so it will be interesting to see which core-logic technology ATi will be supporting with its MVP.
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Having developed military solutions based on up to 32 cards in the past, it appears that ATi has decided on a "tile" based rendering approach as the default technology and perhaps the judgement was that this method offers the most ideal balance of speed and image quality (minimum size 32 pixels square). However it's more than likely that the ATi MVP solution will be flexible to offer other rendering modes like AFR (Alternate Frame Rendering) as well.

Not only that, but another scenario given was if the motherboard had an on-board ATI graphics processor. Guess what, that also gets included into the mix! So it will be possible to have three VPUs running at the same time, powering our games.

The folks over at HardOCP decided to find out the hard way if upgrading to Windows XP Professional x64 Edition would offer an ehanced gaming experience. Armed with an Athlon 64 FX-55 and testing with both the GeForce 6800 Ultra and an ATI Radeon X850 XT-PE, author Brent Justice tallied the results from eight high-profile games. The results were only slightly unexpected.

What we found isn't too shocking really, but rather reassuring. In all the 32-bit games tested, we saw overall static performance using Windows XP Pro x64 Edition. The only game in our lineup that had a specific Win64 AMD64 instruction path, The Chronicles of Riddick, actually performed worse in 64-bit than it did in 32-bit Windows.

So pretty much across the board there is a neglible difference, if any at all, so if you want to dive into the 64-bit era, knock yourself out. However, there are still a few kinks. Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory refused to work and Steam had a rather minor installation issue, so it's apparent some work still needs to be done.

Today at WinHEC, Microsoft and Samsung revealed their hybrid hard drive, designed for use with the next-gen version of Windows (currently codenamed Longhorn). The HHD combines standard hard drive technology with Samsung's OneNAND flash memory, which will replace the standard 8-32MB cache memory on current drives. The 1 Gigabit flash memory has much faster read/write speeds, so using that as the buffer will increase performance. Other benefits include less spinning of the drive (meaning less power consumption; great for laptops) and faster boot times. Samsung will ship the HHD in large quantities in late 2006.

Looking to make things even simplier for the gadget freaks on the go, Microsoft, with a partnership with the University of Maryland, has been researching new ways to use mobile devices using only your thumb. The purpose is to ditch the necessity of two hands; one to hold the device and another to use a stylus. At the moment, Microsoft is looking at two designs.

The first is called AppLens. The screen shows a 3x3 grid of applications (nine in all). Tap with your thumb to select one and the application goes to full view. The system also makes use of gestures; simple movement patterns of your thumb that are linked to specific commands. The other option is LaunchTile. It's also a grid, but it's 6x6 and only shows 4 of the possible 36 applications. Users then have to use a d-pad to scroll around the grid. A study was done at the U of Maryland and users preferred the simplicity of AppLens over LaunchTile. Check the article for pictures of the two designs. Now we just need Microsoft to finish up the fabled xPod/xBoy so we can use this!

A few weeks ago, Sony president Ryoji Chubachi publicly stated that he hoped to work with the backers of HD-DVD (NEC, Toshiba) to find a compromise and merge the two competing standards for the next-gen DVD format. While it was first thought talks had broken down, it appears both sides are communicating and it could be another two months before a deal is reached. Another possible scenario is to require players to be capable of handling both HD-DVD and Blu-ray discs instead of requiring two separate players.

A handy comparison of the two formats can be found here. On a technical standpoint, Blu-ray appears superior, but HD-DVD has an advantage in that their discs can be produced using existing manufacturing processes whereas Blu-ray requires new equipment. Sony has already announced it'll use Blu-ray in the PS3 and its upcoming Vaio laptops, but if a new standard is created, we could see delays. Movie studios, however, have been split.

As part of one its recent Steam updates, Valve asked gamers to fill out a new survey geared to find out what hardware their users are using. With close to 900,000 submissions returned, we can start to get a clear idea of the hardware choices of gamers. For instance, who do gamers like more, ATi or nVidia? It's actually a pretty close race with nVidia at 51% and ATi at 41%. However, the most used card is from the ATi 9800 series, most likely due to all the gamers who bought the card to get a free copy of Half-Life 2.

As for processors, it's even closer, with Intel at 52.5% and AMD at 47.5%. Another interesting stat would be that 86% of users have DVD drives. Looks like it's now a good time to start releasing those games on DVD!