October 22 - 2:30pm EDT   ASUS has announced it is now shipping its new gaming notebooks, the 15.4- or 15.6-inch G50 and 17-inch G71 that can be equipped with Intel's Core 2 Extreme quad-core mobile CPU. Both use NVIDIA's GeForce 9700M GT GPU with a dedicated 512MB of memory for not only graphics processing but other time-intensive computational tasks such as converting videos into other formats. The GPUs include support for technologies such as NVIDIA PhysX and other video acceleration and image-processing capabilities. Software drivers for NVIDIA PhysX and CUDA technologies will be offered as free downloads over the next few months. [full story]

August 12 - 11:55am EDT   NVIDIA on Tuesday gave its existing customers a bonus through the GeForce Power Pack, a new set of drivers that expose new features to certain GeForce cards. The upgrade takes advantage of the more universal nature of the effects processing cores in GeForce 8-, 9- and GTX-series cards to drive tasks that would normally depend on the main CPU. All these cards can now speed up physics in games and other apps that support PhysX; in specially enabled game maps with the new physics turned on, a mid-range GeForce 9800 GTX+ is nearly three times faster than the ATI Radeon HD 4850 that NVIDIA hopes to beat. [full story]

May 22 - 1:10am EDT   NVIDIA plans on refreshing its GPU line-up next month with two new graphics card that will feature its next-generation CUDA-enabled graphics core, codenamed D10U. The company is expected to deliver both the GeForce GTX 260 (D10U-20) and GeForce GTX 280 (D10U-30) on June 18th as part of its summer refresh, according to DailyTech. The report claims that the GTX 260 will be a "significantly" scaled down version of the GTX 280, which will enable all 240 unified stream processors designed into the processor. These second-generation unified shaders perform 50 percent better than the shaders than its previous-generation offering, the company claims in its documentation; however, ... [full story]

February 4 - 7:25pm EST   Nvidia today announced an official acquisition of Ageia Technologies, the company behind the PhysX software and hardware components. The acquisition will give Nvidia a physics element for its Cuda parallel processing systems. The PhysX technology is currently in use in many Xbox 360, Playstation 3 and Nintendo Wii games, as well as many gaming PCs worldwide. Nvidia will be hosting a quarterly conference call on February 13th to provide more information about the acquisition in its final stages. [full story]