Looking for a decent graphics card that'll power Vista but won't break the bank. PowerColor might just have the right gear to tempt you. Just don't expect to be playing Crysis with this at full whack anytime soon.

PCSTATS reviews the budget oriented Powercolor X1550 512MB PCI Express videocard for basic Windows Vista compatibility. You do not have to blow a lot of money on a new videocard if you don't play games. PowerColor has put together a package that allows you to fully take advantage of all the visual goodies Microsoft Windows Vista has to offer at a fair price.

VR Zone saw some R600 cards at CeBIT but of course any form of official photography is restricted as AMD is keeping a close watch making sure nothing is leaked outside. Nevertheless, they still managed to get some shots on the retail R600XTX (Radeon X2900 XTX) card. Also they have some preliminary benchmarks figures of the R600 XTX card vs a GeForce 8800 GTX card.

 

 The R600XTX retail card is codenamed Dragonhead 2. It is a 12-layer card at 9.5" long with a max TDP of 240W. It is clocked at 800MHz on 80nm process technology, 512-bit memory interface and has 1GB GDDR4 memories onboard. It has 6-pin and 8-pin PCIe connectors but two 2x3 PCIe power can be used.

 

 Initial 3DMark 2006 scores look to favour the R600.

PC Perspective talks to the bigwigs at Nvidia to find out why Vista drivers are so complex and the problems behind Direct x10 and SLI support.

For Windows XP, NVIDIA simply needed to create two main driver components; really two separate drivers.  One for DirectX rendering and one for OpenGL rendering.  With Vista though, things have changed, and NVIDIA now needs to develop six separate drivers.  One for DX9 single card, one for DX9 SLI, one for DX10 single card, one for DX10 SLI, one for OpenGL single card and one for OpenGL SLI modes.  While you might just think the move from Windows XPs DX9 driver to Windows Vistas DX9 driver should be an easy port, the move to the new driver model changed all of that.  Microsoft moved the driver stack into the user space in the operating system, effectively making the graphics driver a part of the external OS instead of the OS kernel.  This keeps the kernel much more stable in the long run, but adds another layer of abstraction for NVIDIAs software to get through before directly accessing the hardware. 

The DirectX 10 driver development has been delayed mainly because of the difficulties in being the first to develop such a piece of software (ATI has no DX10 parts available yet).    NVIDIA also claimed that each of the six drivers that NVIDIA has to develop for Windows Vista is roughly 20 million lines of code long; about as much code as Windows NT 4!  While I am sure there is some significant driver overlap between the six separate modules and the 20 million lines on each, projects of that magnitude are something most normal people couldn't even begin to wrap their heads around.

Sounds like we should all cut them some slack. Not!

VR-Zone reported that a number of GeForce 7-series graphics cards would hit end of life status on April 28, suggesting that Nvidia plans to release some GeForce 8-series replacements before that date. Well, the site now says Nvidia will introduce its first mainstream GeForce 8 derivatives on April 17.

Techreport.com heard various rumors regarding mainstream GeForce 8 cards over the past few weeks, but VR-Zone claims that Nvidia will launch three models on April 17: a $199-249 GeForce 8600 GTS, a $149-169 GeForce 8600 GT, and a $79-99 GeForce 8500 GT. All three cards will reportedly pack 256MB of memory, and the GeForce 8600 models will have 128-bit memory buses. The site even quotes core and memory speeds, although if the launch is indeed a month and a half away, those specs are naturally liable to change. According to VR-Zone, the GeForce 8600 GTS will run at 700MHz with 1GHz memory, the GeForce 8600 GT will be clocked at 600MHz/700MHz, and the GeForce 8500 GT will have speeds of 450MHz/400MHz.

Full Story

After the announcement last month by AMD postponing the launch of its new next generation graphics card, the ATI R600, until the second quarter, more bad news comes for those attending this years CeBit trade show. According to Digit Times the delay will mean that AMD keep the R600 low key and stop card manufacturing partners from giving live demos of the R600 graphics cards. AMD will authorize a few trusted partners to showcase AMD demo systems behind closed doors.

DigiTimes says some AMD partners are afraid R600-free show booths at CeBit might turn off long-time ATI customers and reduce both confidence in the brand and, ultimately, sales of all ATI-branded hardware. Nevertheless, some partners are keeping hope, and DigiTimes adds that there is now an increasing amount of speculation that AMD will unveil a complete, "top-to-bottom" DirectX 10 lineup in the second quarter.

Before you get all excited, they are coming soon. Soon I tell you!

A new set of beta ForceWare graphics drivers for Windows Vista will finally bring SLI support for GeForce 7 and GeForce 6 series graphics cards. Also on the menu will be performance improvements in OpenGL games, performance improvements for SLI setups running at high resolutions, and fixes for the following bugs. Bugs what bugs, this is Nvidia and Vista

• Brief corruption (flickering, boxes) on screen at Windows Vista login, CTR-ALT-DEL (Task Manager), or other function that requires Vista User Account Control
  
• Playback issues when playing TV/DVD/video in Media Center with Aero enabled - Outputting via TV-Out shows only a black and white display
• HDTV output does not keep HDTV resolution after restart 
• Adjusting Video Color settings from the NVIDIA Control Panel are not getting applied.
• Change Flat Panel Scaling page does not correctly work in the NVIDIA Control Panel.
• Brightness, Contrast and Gamma values remain the same in Adjust Desktop Color settings once closing and opening the NVIDIA Control Panel.
• Corruption on DVI monitor while going to hibernation from standby
• Call of Duty 2 has no performance gain when SLI is enabled
• Madden NFL 07 while playing the screen will freeze, but the game will continue to run and you hear the in-game sounds.
  

This ForceWare release for Vista will improve support GeForce 8800, GeForce 7, and GeForce 6 graphics cards. 

Images of a prototype AMD R600 have surfaced on the net thanks to ZDNET writer David Berlind. He published some images of an AMD R600 graphics card captured at an AMD press conference. The pictures show the upcoming R600 GPU in all it's glory. Luckily he managed to snap five images before the bouncers at the AMD press conference roughed him up for taking low quality pictures of their new baby.

The size certainly looks enough to impress any 8800GTX owners out there. Check out the stock cooling. It must pump out some heat as it looks to be using a fairly heavy duty heatsink and fan. The writer did have permission to take the snaps (we were just kidding about the AMD bouncers, they really are nice guys you know) so we must presume they are legit.

 

There will be a new Windows Vista Beta driver release available to download from NVIDIA in the next few days. This is a new driver which will support GeForce 6, 7 and 8 series graphics boards; it does not support GeForce Go mobile GPUs. Please continue to check with your notebook manufacturer for a new driver for GeForce Go GPUs. GeForce FX users should continue to use the v96.85 driver.

The Vista Quality Assurance homepage has up to the date information on when the driver will be available to download, so please continue to check this website: http://www.nvidia.com/object/vistaqualityassurance.html.

Here is a summary of new features and bug fixes this new driver addresses:

New Features

• GeForce 7 series SLI support
  
• GeForce 6 series SLI support
  
• GeForce 7950 GX2 support (both GPUs are now operational)

More bug's have been fixed, please view the main article for more information.