Nvidia content relations VP Roy Taylor said that PC gaming has moved beyond reasonable justification for pirating PC games.

The executive suggested that it was unfair to steal content from the same developers who are struggling to keep the PC gaming market alive in a market dominated by surging console sales.

"I think that we've arrived at a point now where I don't know how anyone could ever possibly justify pirating a game," Taylor told Eurogamer. "I just don't know how anyone could consider that a cool thing to do - it's not. It sucks."

"One of the things that I find frustrating is that PC gamers tend to be very passionate, and they love the people that make great PC games. If you ask any PC gamer what they think of John Carmack, they'll say he's a hero. What do they think of... Read more

In the face of a changing PC landscape, graphics card manufacturer Nvidia is now hoping to market their products in a way that makes more sense to average consumers.

"It is a challenge that we're looking at right now. There is a need to simplify [the Nvidia product line] for consumers, there's no question," said Nvidia business VP Roy Taylor to GamesIndustry.biz.

The company has frequently been criticized for its confusing product names. For example, Nvidia's 8800 GT outperforms the 9600 GT, which many would assume to be more powerful due to its higher number.

"We think that the people who understand and know GeForce today, they're okay with it--they understand it. But if we're going to widen our appeal, there's no doubt that we have to solve that problem."

Nvidia has recently been making more of an effort to target mid-range users. The launch of the GeForce 9600 GT last February marked the first time a mid-range card debuted a product line for the company.

Recently released documents from Microsoft reveal that drivers for Nvidia PC graphics cards were the cause of roughly 29% of logged crashes in Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system, Ars Technica reports.

The documentation details that Nvidia drivers caused 479,000 crashes out of a total of 1,663,748 logged by Microsoft across an unspecified period in 2007. Microsoft's own drivers followed at roughly 18%. Rival video card manufacturer ATI clocked in at fourth with 9.3%, and Intel at fifth with 8.8%.

The information was found within 158 pages of internal emails made public as part of an ongoing lawsuit against Microsoft for their hand in alleged artificial inflation of computer prices during the 2006 holiday season.

Numerous reports of users experiencing difficulties with Nvidia drivers on Vista had surfaced at the time of its debut, leading many to label the operating system as a buggy or unstable system. The revealed statistics represent the first publicly available hard data on the root cause of Windows Vista instability.

Microsoft recently released Vista Service Pack 1, which reportedly boosts gaming performance on the platform.

Graphics processor manufacturer Nvidia today launched a line of products with a midrange card for the first time in its history as a company.

The GeForce 9600 GT, the first card in the GeForce 9 series, will retail for $169-189 according to HardOCP.

Nvidia typically debuts new card lineups with pricey top-of-the-line models. The sub-$200 9600 GT is seen as a significant departure for the company, at a time when the PC gaming industry has taken flak for being too complex and costly for consumers to follow.

Earlier this week Nvidia became a founding member of the PC Gaming Alliance, a consortium of PC-invested companies with the goal of streamlining PC gaming and promoting the platform.

Hardware manufacturer Nvidia today announced its plans to acquire physics technology developer AGEIA, with the company stating it will integrate AGEIA's PhysX technology into its future line of GeForce graphics cards.

"By combining the teams that created the world's most pervasive GPU and physics engine brands, we can now bring GeForce-accelerated PhysX to hundreds of millions of gamers around the world," said Huang.

Founded in 2002, AGEIA made a name for itself by inventing the Physics Processing Unit (PPU) chip, the world's first dedicated hardware physics processor for personal computers. The company also develops physics software, boasting a list of over 140 games across multiple platforms that utilize PhysX technology.

"Nvidia is the perfect fit for us," added AGEIA CEO Manju Hegde. "They have the world's best parallel computing technology and are the thought leaders in GPUs and gaming. We are united by a common culture based on a passion for innovating and driving the consumer experience."

Processor manufacturer AMD was rumored to be eyeing AGEIA for purchase in November, but had since denied the claims. Competitor Intel picked up physics software developer Havok last September.

The deal is all but final, with only customary closing conditions in the way. More details of the acquisition will be available following Nvidia's quarterly conference call on Feb 13.

An extended PC demo of Valve Software's 2007 hit (and Shacknews Game of the Year by both readers and editors) Portal (PC, PS3, X360) will be made available for free to gamers with NVIDIA graphics cards, the developer announced today.

The demo, called Portal: First Slice, comes as part of a recent agreement between Valve and NVIDIA to "collaborate on development, distribution, events, and more." Gamers equipped with NVIDIA graphics cards looking to give the test chambers and deathtraps of the Aperture Science labs a trial run must allow Steam to auto-detect their NVIDIA cards to unlock the demo.

First Slice and the collaborative campaign between the two companies marks a departure from the former marketing team-up between ATI and Valve, shifted by an increase in NVIDIA hardware use among Steam gamers. "More Steam gamers, including myself, play on NVIDIA hardware than any other GPU," said Valve marketing VP Doug Lombardi, citing Valve's frequent gamer hardware surveys.

Portal: First Slice is available for immediate download from Steam—provided, of course, that you've got an NVIDIA card under the hood. Like Valve's previous free game offer for ATI users, this download also includes Half-Life 2: The Lost Coast and Half-Life 2 Deathmatch, as well as Peggle Extreme.

Financial publication Forbes has named PC graphics card manufacturer Nvidia its 2007 Company of the Year, as reported in the January 7, 2008 issue of the magazine.

Forbes points to Nvidia's current advantage in the graphics market as well as its incredible growth as a company, over the last five years and in the last year particularly, as the reasoning behind the honor--the company's revenues are at $4 billion, up 33% year over year, and its profits are at $900 million, up 50% year over year, while its share price is up 2100% since its 1999 IPO.

The success of the Santa Clara, California-based company is pinned on CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, who cofounded it in 1993. As Nvidia competes with Intel's integrated graphics solutions on the low end, and new AMD subsidiary ATI's dedicated cards on the high end, Huang indicated he plans to continue running Nvidia the way that has brought its current success: by constantly iterating and improving its core product.

Meanwhile it provides the graphics chip for the PS3, is expanding out into the non-gaming arena of research analysis hardware, and hopes to drive sophisticated graphics in less-hardcore areas such as web interfaces. "What if Google Earth had a 3D representation of every single building, every single square meter on Earth, and you could access it in the blink of an eye?" Huang asked. "The more content there is, the more visual interest there can be, the more processing horsepower people need."

New drivers are now available for AMD/ATI- and NVidia-powered video cards. For ForceWare 94.24 drivers for Windows XP go here. Radeon owners can find new Catalyst drivers at the AMD website.

NVidia has finally released new XP drivers for 7 series cards. The 94.24 drivers are available here. In addition, the 158.22 8 series drivers are also out enabling TurboCache. You can grab those in 32bit and 64bit flavors.

New ForceWare drivers for GeForce 8x00 powered videocards running under Windows XP and Media Center are now available. The 158.22 release offers numerous game and application compatibility fixes and performance increasements, and adds GeForce 8800 Ultra support. Thanks Blues.

Over at the NVidia site you can find new ForceWare drivers for 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows Vista, adding support for newly released GeForce 8x00 GS/GT/GTS videocards. According to release notes, there are fixes for games like Oblivion, Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War, Serious Sam 2 and Dark Messiah of Might & Magic among others.

Forgot to mention yesterday yet another NVidia Vista driver release. These ones are somehow WHQL certified if you can believe that. They are listed as 8800 specific but actually work for 6/7 series cards as well. Grab the 32bit and 64bit builds.

Companies are rolling out the third GeForce 8 GPU based product today, the GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB. Similar to the previous 8800 GTS, memory has been halved resulting in a lower price point. The new card(s) have been tested at HardOCP, AnandTech, PC Perspective, I4U, MadShrimps, Bjorn3D and Guru3D.

NVidia has opened a Vista Quality Assurance page on their website, noting that "NVIDIA is committed to supporting Microsoft Windows Vista on current and previous GPU generations". There are also plans for monthly driver releases. Thanks Tech Report.

So people have been fussy about the price of videocards at the high end being pretty darn insane these days. Apparently the prices have offended some folks so much that they decided to take NVidia and ATI (now AMD) to court over it.

Summons were issued by one Trong Nguyen on behalf of himself and others against Nvidia, ATI, and AMD. Lots of other plaintiffs have joined in, following news that ATI and Nvidia received summons from the Department of Justice ... The allegation is that Nvidia, ATI and AMD conspired to manipulate graphics card pricing [snip]

It goes on to saying that the two companies pretty much got together over donuts and tequila to decide on the prices to break gamers hearts. Laughing over the pain inflicted on poor people everywhere absolutely forced with no alternative to buy those $600 videocards.

NVidia has released version 97.44 of the ForceWare drivers for GeForce powered videocards. This new release adds support for GeForce 8800 GTS and GTX powered videocards, and according to the release notes there are fixes for Civilization IV, Splinter Cell: Double Agent, EverQuest 2 and Battlefield 2 graphics issues.

Generally we havent been giving many big headlines to the ongoing generational improvements of videocards from NVidia and ATI but the 8800 from NVidia that was unveiled today is worth noting. Usually you look for a 15-30% jump in performance with cards but this thing is actually doubling up on a lot of benchmarks. Check out the reviews at HardOCP, Tech-Report

Fortunately, the green team did take that risk, and they managed to pull it off. I still can't believe the G80 is a collection of scalar stream processors, and I'm shocked that it performs so well. The real-world, delivered performance in today's OpenGL and DirectX 9-class games is roughly twice that of the Radeon X1950 XTX. Yes, it's taken 680 million transistors to get there, but this kind of performance gain from one generation to the next is remarkable, a testament to the effectiveness of the G80's implementation of unified shaders.

No second videocard needed, and the thing is damn quiet too. Now just gotta wait for the prices to drop a bit.

Over at FiringSquad you can find an article about the NVIDIA PureVideo HD technology, checking out the performance of its high-def video decoding.

Over at the NVidia website you can now find version 91.47 of the ForceWare drivers for GeForce videocards. According to the release notes, the driver fixes issues related to Half-Life 2: Lost Coast, Prince of Persia: The Warrior Within, Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter and Hitman: Blood Money.

The guys at HardOCP have posted this Q&A with Chris Daniel, asking the NVIDIA product manager about the company's Quad SLI launch.