July 14 - 7:20am EDT   NVIDIA this morning confirmed its planned price cuts and today slashed the costs it dictates for GeForce GTX graphics cards. The top-end GeForce GTX 280 sees the steepest decline and drops from $649 to $499 for a typical 1GB card; the more mid-range GeForce GTX 260 also drops from its earlier $399 to $299 for an 896MB card. The prices should take effect almost immediately but may vary for non-standard cards from certain board makers. [full story]

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]

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 19 - 12:00pm EDT   NVIDIA today addressed the sudden performance gaps created by the GeForce GTX 200 with a new mid-range video chipset. The GeForce 9800 GTX+ has the same two-slot design as the earlier 9800 GTX but uses NVIDIA's smaller and more efficient 55 nanometer technology to ramp up clock speeds: a reference card's core speed increases from 675MHz to 738MHz while shaders jump from 1688MHz to 1836MHz. Both are intended to give the card better performance against AMD's upcoming ATI Radeon HD 4850 launching later this month. [full story]

June 16 - 4:30pm EDT   NVIDIA on Monday used the occasion of its GTX 200 introduction to quietly update its Tesla line of workstation processor cards. The T10P chipset added to the cards is virtually identical to the 240-core GTX but is her spun entirely towards accelerating high performance computing tasks such as medical research and very high-level math. The very specialized nature of the chip lets it calculate as much as 900 gigaflops by itself, or 73 percent more than the earlier card it replaces. [full story]

June 16 - 2:10pm EDT   HP today followed up NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 200 unveiling with expanded details on an upgrade to the Blackbird 002. The Exhilaration Edition bundles two GTX 280 cards in SLI mode and gives the gaming PC a substantial advantage over its previous configuration. Both cards are also liquid-cooled and so won't overheat at full speed, HP adds. The system also gets a 3.2GHz Core 2 Extreme with a similar cooling treatment and is paired up with low-lag Corsair DDR3 memory. [full story]

June 16 - 10:00am EDT   NVIDIA today took the wraps from its anticipated GTX 200 series video chipset, introducing its first new architecture since the 8-series appeared in late 2006. All new boards have an architecture which is as much as 50 percent faster than even the top-end 8800 Ultra; the fastest part in the launch, the GTX 280, nearly doubles the amount of effects processors to 240. [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]