December 1 - 5:20pm EST   Windows 7 promises to bring with it a pair of programs that will enable users to process Direct3D 10 graphics on Direct3D 9 hardware as well as processing Direct3D 9-level graphics with no hardware at all, according to an MSDN article. The former feat is made possible with software called Direct3D 10 Level9, while the latter comes courtesy of Direct3D Windows Advanced Rasterization Platform (WARP10). The new standard is a high-speed, fully compatible software rasterizer that has already shipped in beta form in the November 2008 DirectX SDK. [full story]

November 7 - 1:00pm EST   NVIDIA on Thursday announced the release of two new entry-level graphics processing solutions for workstations with its first Quadro FX 470 integrated mainboard GPU and the Quadro FX 370 Low Profile standalone PCIe card meant for use in small form factor desktop PCs. Either GPU is certified for CAD and digital media apps by software makers that include Autodesk and Adobe. Both new NVIDIA products feature 128-bit precision graphics processing and 32-bit floating point precision, filtering and blending, along with advanced color compression and early z-culling. They have full-scene antialiasing capabilities as well and support OpenGL 2.1 and DirectX 10 for 3D work. [full story]

October 31 - 4:55pm EDT   OCZ on Thursday announced the introduction of its first 15-inch Gaming Notebook based on an Intel Centrino 2 platform. As with the company's previous DIY (Do It Yourself) products, the idea is to let users spec their own systems for their own applications. All of the new 15.4-inch, 1280x800 notebooks include an ATI Radeon HD 3650 GPU with 512MB of dedicated memory and DirectX 10.1 compatibility. There is also a choice of optical drives, ranging between a dual-layer DVD drive or a slower multi-drive that includes Blu-ray support. CPU support includes Intel's range of Core 2 Duo and Extreme processors, ranging from 2.0 GHz to 2.6GHz. [full story]

September 10 - 7:45am EDT   AMD started off Wednesday by setting a new relative ground floor for performance and hoping to beat NVIDIA's GeForce 9500 cards. The Radeon HD 4600 series is claimed to outperform both the 9500 GT and AMD's own earlier Radeon HD 3650 by including all the hardware optimizations of the 4800 series and still keeping 320 stream (visual effects) processors. It's also one of the least expensive graphics chipsets to support DirectX 10.1 and newer OpenGL 2.x visual effects, such as more precise lighting. [full story]

July 23 - 9:45am EDT   Microsoft's next version of DirectX will have its own alternative to the OpenCL standard proposed by Apple, the company revealed yesterday at its GamesFest conference. DirectX 11 will have support for "compute shader technology" that allows modern, more generalized video cards' effects processors to perform tasks other than rendering video, including physics calculations and other chores that would normally be handled by the main system processor. [full story]