July 3 - 2:50pm EDT   NVIDIA will soon cut prices for its GeForce GTX cards despite releasing the hardware less than three weeks ago, the company confirmed today. Although unwilling to provide specific details, company spokesmen Bryan Del Rizzo and Ken Brown say the company is "adjusting the prices" for the GTX 260 and 280 downwards from their respective $400 and $650 markers and should be more affordable by next week. The costs will vary by card manufacturer, many of whom produce overclocked or otherwise non-reference versions. [full story]

July 3 - 8:35am EDT   AMD is preparing a dual-chip version of its Radeon HD 4870 card within a matter of weeks, say board designers. The 4870 X2 would be a direct sequel to the 3870 X2 and would once again graft two high-end graphics processors on to one card with a similarly doubled amount of memory; the 4870 edition would be the first home card to carry 2GB of total memory. Past cards have also been underclocked slightly from the single-chip version to avoid overheating. [full story]

July 1 - 6:30pm EDT   ShareTool 1.2 ($20) remote access solution for Mac OS X. ShareTool lets users access all of the Bonjour services on their home network from anywhere in the world. This includes iTunes Music Sharing, Screen Sharing, File Sharing, and more. With ShareTool, users can listen to their entire iTunes music library at work, control the screen of any of their home computers, or grab that important file they forgot to bring with them. This version adds automatic compression of network traffic, a much improved interface, and several bug fixes.[Download - 5.6MB] Tri-BACKUP 5.0.3 ($70) Mac OS X backup tool. Version 5.0.3 has bug correction, as well as a set of new features: improved FTP backup, ... [full story]

June 26 - 8:20am EDT   AMD finished off its latest round of graphics updates on Thursday with the introduction of the All-in-Wonder HD. The card blends both a modern (though unspecified) Radeon HD video card with a Theater 650 Pro tuner that lets it both play modern 3D games and other titles while also picking up HDTV through either over-the-air antenna and cable signals. Both software from AMD itself and Microsoft's Windows Media Center automatically recognize the tuner and can use it to play live shows and record them, turning the PC into a makeshift DVR; the AMD software can also convert captured videos into formats usable by iPods and other handhelds. [full story]

June 25 - 7:45am EDT   AMD this morning publicly rounded out its video card updates with the full launch of the ATI Radeon HD 4800 series. The launch supports earlier low-key announcements but marks the formal appearance of the higher-end Radeon HD 4870; the double-slot card is said to be twice as fast as an equivalent Radeon HD 3870 card and performs at about 1.2 teraflops per second, or enough floating-point math calculations to generate help generate AMD's purportedly near-realistic Cinema 2.0 experience with high detail, many objects, and camera-like focusing effects. [full story]

June 20 - 11:00am EDT   Preempting a formal introduction by AMD alone, both AMD and Diamond have publicly introduced the Radeon HD 4850. Both the reference video card and Diamond's own model are some of the few upper mid-range cards to fit in a single card slot while still outperforming more expensive cards: in benchmarks, the 4850 is known to roughly match the performance of the more expensive GeForce 9800 GTX and the dual-chip Radeon HD 3870 X2. A boost in the number of stream (pixel and vertex) processors from 320 to 480, plus a 625MHz core clock speed and 993MHz memory, is credited for much of the improvement. [full story]

June 17 - 8:35am EDT   AMD's next-generation video chipset will be capable of graphics that are movie-realistic, the company claimed today. A preview of the RV770 chipset, which is used both in the FireStream 9250 and should form the heart of the Radeon HD 4870, has been labeled Cinema 2.0 for its ability to recreate near-photorealistic footage in real time. The two teraflops of performance from two RV770 chips is enough to not only accurately model many very detailed objects in one scene, drawing them at a better-than-film 25-30 frames per second, but also to add many of the effects that are produced by a real camera, such as depth-of-field or motion blur. [full story]

June 12 - 5:00pm EDT   AMD made a late announcement on Thursday expanding its Radeon for Mac lineup. The ATI-branded Radeon HD 3870 for Mac & PC is AMD's first 3000-series card for Macs and also one of the first to explicitly support more than one platform: users can install the card now in either a Mac Pro tower or a Windows PC and swap it to the other platform later, including for Boot Camp. As a new-generation part, the new chipset has twice as much performance per watt as the outgoing Radeon HD 2900 XT, the company claims. [full story]

June 10 - 4:00am EDT   HP today gave virtually all its notebook line both a cosmetic and performance update, including some of the first Centrino 2-based notebooks. The Pavilion series is now said to have a subtler look with displays that are flush with the bezel, silver-on-silver insides, and a new Imprint finish on the outside. The Intel-based systems use their new notebook platform to supply both faster Core 2 processors as well as faster X4500 graphics on systems that go without dedicated video hardware, while a similar match uses the platform behind the Turion Ultra platform. Improved touch-sensitive media controls and an External SATA port are common across most systems, HP notes. ... [full story]

June 9 - 8:00am EDT   Much of Lenovo's upcoming ThinkPad line has been slipped late yesterday through Engadget. An escaped presentation reportedly confirms the existence of the X200 ultra-slim notebook and suggests Lenovo will offer much faster performance even a smaller system than the X300. The 12-inch X200 is set to use Intel's full-speed but low-power Core 2 Duos at speeds up to 2.4GHz; a combination of solid-state drives (up to 64GB) and an optional nine-cell battery pack will boost battery life up to 9.6 hours. The system will have a DisplayPort connection and options for 3G data, GPS, ultra-wideband, and WiMAX. [full story]

June 4 - 2:25pm EDT   AMD is delaying the launch of the Radeon HD 4850 by one week, according to check with card makers on the show floor. While the card is already believed to be shipping to PC makers and will still be shown to the press on June 18th, an actual launch is now set for June 23rd, or just under a week later than a launch that would have released the cards on the same day as the media receives the device. The change has reportedly left board makers "upset" as they now have to sit on unsold 4850 cards for 20 days. [full story]

May 30 - 4:45pm EDT   Investigations in Taiwan on Friday have reportedly confirmed that AMD has begun shipping its first Radeon HD 4000-series video chipset. The ATI Radeon HD 4850 is purportedly already on its way to card manufacturers and stores, and will represent a significant boost to the clock speed of the earlier, mid-range 3850 without affecting its heat; the core speed jumps from 670MHz to 800MHz while still occupying a single card slot. [full story]

May 28 - 12:15pm EDT   Much of ASUS' notebooks running both Intel's Centrino 2 platform and the corresponding AMD Puma foundation have been revealed in advance, according to several leaks from Notebook Italia. The M-series will still serve as ASUS' media-oriented flagships, but will now trade power savings for performance: the stock M51VR will use Intel's new low-power 2.53GHz Core 2 Duo that uses only 3MB of Level 2 cache but also consumes just 25W of average power, while both the M51VA and the 17-inch M70VM will use a 35W chip that doubles the cache size to 6MB. [full story]

May 23 - 2:40pm EDT   (Update with corrections) The version of Photoshop included with Adobe's future Creative Suite 4 will include fuller acceleration both for dedicated video hardware as well as the first support for physics processing, TGDaily has been told as part of an early demonstration. While CS3 has already had limited support for graphics processing units (GPUs) for certain filters, the new version will use video hardware to improve performance across much of the image editor's pipeline. It will also enable new editing techniques: users can bring in a 3D image and paint it with changes applied immediately. [full story]

May 21 - 4:50pm EDT   AMD on Wednesday announced details on utilizing new GDDR5 memory in upcoming next generation ATI Radeon graphics cards. Graphics Double Data Rate version 5 is expected to become the new industry standard, the company says, as it provides up to four times the data speed rates of GDDR4 memory. [full story]