Eighteen months is a very long time in the world of graphics cards. This is roughly how long the venerable GeForce GTX 750 Ti from NVIDIA has been on the market. When the card was released, it offered an amazing level of efficiency with the new Maxwell architecture and just enough performance for those wanting to play games at 1080p resolutions. Since then, NVIDIA has pretty much ignored the sub-$200 graphics card market allowing AMD to push out a variety of cards that offered superior performance at roughly the same cost even if they were not as efficient. Now NVIDIA is taking the newer 900 series cards and releasing a new GeForce GTX 950 to fill in the gap between the older GTX 750 Ti and the still over $200 GTX 960. PC gamers on a budget will definitely want to take a look at it. Continue reading
NVIDIA Improves Performance and Efficiency With GTX 980 and GTX 970 Cards
NVIDIA surprised the PC graphics last night with their launch of their latest high end consumer graphics card the GeForce GTX 980. Much of this has to do with the fact that the price is going to be significantly less than the GTX 780 Ti that it will be replacing but the card is able to do so by being far more efficient akin to what AMD did recently with their Radeon R9 285. The basic chip technology hasn’t really changed that much for the past four years in the graphics market but the way that it is used certainly has. NVIDIA demonstated this when they launched the GTX 750 Ti at the beginning of the year. In fact, the GPU for the GTX 980 and the more affordable GTX 970 are both based on the second generation of the Maxwell chip that powered the GTX 750 Ti. So what exactly does this new graphics card bring with it? Continue reading
NVIDIA Shield Tablet – Third Time a Charm?
Anyone remember NVIDIA’s SHIELD device? It was basically a game controller with a small tablet grafted onto it. How about the Tegra 7 Note? That was a 7-inch tablet that was designed for gaming. Both were attempts by NVIDIA to jump start their efforts into the mobile arena by trying to entice dedicated PC gamers to also use a mobile device. Neither was very successful in the market. Part of this may have been due to the pricing of the devices and also because they have limitations when compared to other tablets on the market.
Well, NVIDIA is at it again this time taking what they learned from the first two and hoping that their third try will be a success with the NVIDIA SHIELD Tablet. But is it really doing anything different from the other two? Continue reading
NVIDIA G-SYNC Available Now For DIY Crowd
Since late last fall, there has been much buzz about NVIDIA’s . If you are not familiar with what that is, it is a pairing of NVIDIA hardware with a compatible monitor that provides a dynamically generated refresh rate on the display to prevent the image tearing caused by PC games that have a frame rate that does not match up with the monitors fixed rate. The thing is, there are no monitors currently available to consumers right now that feature the G-SYNC hardware in them to take advantage of it. That will likely be resolved when the first displays arrive probably near summer 2014.
If you don’t like to wait and happen to be the owner of the popular gaming monitor, NVIDIA would like to give you the opportunity to convert your display to support G-SYNC now. All one has to do is purchase a from NVIDIA for just $199. The downside is that this kit requires that users take apart and replace the internal circuit boards for the display which is a task that few people will probably want to risk. After all, cracking open your display and replacing the parts will void the warranty plus you risk damaging your display in the process of installation.
I highly suggest people view the installation video from NVIDIA below before decided to take the plunge to see if you think you have the skills to do the modification.
Personally, I think that this is something that would be best to wait on. The current price of the ASUS VG248QE is around $270 at making the conversion kit plus a monitor cost $470 and completely voiding any warranty from ASUS.
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