NVIDIA in a low-key move today launched the GeForce GT 240. The chipset brings performance from the mid-level to sub-$100 cards and uses the newer 40 nanometer manufacturing process to make itself a reasonable fit in budget PCs: its low energy use both helps it occupy only one slot and to run entirely off the power of the PCI Express bus instead of needing a separate power connector.
In a rare move of its own, AMD today launched a factory-overclocked version of its ATI Radeon HD 4890 graphics chipset. The move takes the 850MHz core clock speed of the standard edition and boosts it to 1GHz, rendering the new version the first graphics processor of any kind to reach the milestone. AMD claims that the simple shift boosts the peak computing power from 1.36 teraflops to 1.6 and is theoretically faster than NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 285.
PINE announced on Tuesday that its graphics division, XFX, is partnering with AMD to offer ATI Radeon-powered graphics cards, including the company's HD 4000-series GPUs. Up until now, XFX only offered NVIDIA-based graphics cards, but it's believed NVIDIA's recent GPU quality issues and the price cuts on its GTX line of cards are what's causing many graphics card makers to turn elsewhere to restore their margins.
Following last week's introduction of the GeForce 9400M for MacBooks and other notebooks, NVIDIA has also introduced the GeForce 9300 and 9400 for desktop systems. The two not only support the full range of Celeron, Pentium and Core 2 desktop processors but carry roughly the same 16-core graphics processing as the 9400M and thus have much faster 3D performance than Intel's GMA 4500.
After a recent bout of bad press – alleged mass product defects, competitive price cuts, and legal problems – two of Nvidia's largest partners have supposedly jumped ship to pursue alternate ventures with an unnamed company. The news follows the loss of Gainward, a company now fabricating ATI-based boards. While details of the supposed deal are scarce, it is known that the two companies, XFX and EVGA, are not defecting to rival GPU manufacturer ATI.
