Nvidia

Nvidia shows off GeForce 700M GPUs for notebooks

Nvidia yesterday announced five new notebook GPUs designed to deliver the enhanced performance in the devices they're running on.

Collectively known as the GeForce 700M line of GPUs, the chips -- the GT 750M, GT 745M, GT 740M, GT 735M, and GT 720M -- are designed to enhance performance without requiring user input. The GPUs include Nvidia's Boost 2.0 technology, which adjusts clock speed to maximize graphics performance when it's needed. The chips can also enhance battery life, and software that comes with the chips lets users modify visual settings for PC games.

Nvidia's three … Read more

Razer Edge review: The Swiss Army gaming tablet

Take a Windows 8 tablet. Add Nvidia graphics. Mix in a snap-on controller. Toss in a TV-friendly dock. Suddenly, what was a gaming PC in theory can become a console; step back, and a tablet becomes a gaming handheld.

This is the promise that the Razer Edge provides: a Surface for the gaming set, if you will. It's a novel idea that no one else has made tangible yet, and the Razer Edge stands alone in that regard.

At its heart, the Razer Edge is a 10-inch Windows 8 tablet with either a Core i5 or i7 processor, like … Read more

Honda and Audi show the future of driving at Nvidia conference

SAN JOSE, Calif.--Over the past decade, new in-car electronics have helped us navigate and made more music easily available while driving. But if the work shown at Nvidia's GPU Technology Conference (GTC) is any indication, bigger and better changes are in store.

Among the many automotive seminars at this year's GTC, Honda showed off its development of a head-up display, while Audi discussed its initiatives to make urban driving safer.

In Honda's seminar, Victor Ng-Thow-Hing, principal scientist at the Honda Research Institute in Mountain View, Calif., showed head-up display technology that makes current production examples look … Read more

Nvidia CEO says Windows RT is disappointing

Windows RT has turned out to be pretty "disappointing" so far, the chief executive of chipmaker Nvidia said today.

Jen-Hsun Huang, speaking during a meeting with analysts at Nvidia's conference for developers, noted that devices using the software -- such as Microsoft's Surface RT and Asus Vivo Tab RT -- aren't selling very well.

"Windows RT is disappointing to us because we expected to have sold more than we did," Huang said. "Everybody expected to have sold more than we did."

He said the next question is: How important is Windows … Read more

Nvidia CEO unveils next two gens of Tegra, dubbed Logan, Parker

Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang today talked up the chipmaker's next two generations of mobile chip, saying the Tegra chip line will show a 100-times improvement in strength from the first chip to the fifth.

The current Tegra chip, Tegra 4, hit the market earlier this year. The next generation, coming later this year, is code-named Logan, while the fifth generation of Tegra is code-named Parker, Huang said at the company's GPU developers' conference.

Logan will incorporate Nvidia's Kepler GPU, which currently is dominating the discrete graphics market. It also will include CUDA, Nvidia's programming model for … Read more

What does a great Windows 8 gaming laptop need?

A recent question from a reader brought up an issue we've been discussing around the office recently -- the lack of Windows 8 laptops that include both a touch screen and a high-end GPU. Our reader's question, excerpted below:

May I ask for your advice on purchasing a gaming PC? I'm considering the Alienware M14x, but the only thing holding me back is the absence of a touch screen and I can't seem to find powerful laptops with a touch screen. Do you think touch-screen laptops will soon become the standard?

It's true that the … Read more

Asus' lovable Windows 8/Android mashup

The Sony Vaio Tap 20 introduced us to the idea of the all-in-one/tablet hybrid device. Asus has taken that concept, slathered it with Asus' particular brand of experimental enthusiasm, and brought it to life in the form of the $1,299 Transformer AIO.

The Transformer AIO, like the Sony Tap 20, shows an effort to offer consumers an intriguing new blend of all-in-one desktop and semiportable tablet. Rather than following Sony's approach of relying on Windows 8's new touch-friendly interface to achieve that mix with a single, seamless piece of hardware, the Transformer AIO essentially gives you … Read more

Intel's best shot at tablets hasn't arrived yet

Intel won't have its best shot at mobile salvation until late this year. Let's hope that's not too late.

As of today, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Dell, Samsung, and Acer, among others, are all shipping high-profile Windows 8 tablets and hybrids with Intel's "Clover Trail" Atom processor.

And all are billed as running "all your favorite Windows applications."

The problem is that Atom still isn't up to the task, as CNET Reviews and many other reviewers have pointed out.

In short, it's Netbook deja vu all over again. Atom-based Netbooks were never … Read more

Console Wars 2013: Sony PS4 and its competitors

Sony PlayStation 4 The current hot topic in console gaming, the just-announced PlayStation 4, is still largely an enigma. We don't know how much the PS4 will cost, when it's being released (beyond "holiday 2013"), or even what it looks like.

For now, it's still the next-gen hardware to beat, and what little we do know sounds impressive, with an entirely new system architecture based on an X86 AMD CPU/GPU that should make the PS4 easier to develop for and more flexible (and, frankly, more PC-like).

But 2013 will take the traditional three-way console … Read more

ZTE, Nvidia team up to launch Tegra 4 handsets in China

The Chinese phone manufacturer, ZTE, has teamed up with Nvidia to launch a line of quad-core smartphones slated for midyear or earlier. These handsets will feature the Tegra 4 chipset, which was unveiled last month during CES 2013.

Based on ARM Cortex-A15 architecture, Tegra 4 is expected to be much faster and more powerful than its predecessor, which was based on ARM Cortex-A9.

Tegra 4 also features six times as many graphics cores (bringing the total to 72) than its predecessor.

Along with building these quad-core devices, ZTE announced that it plans on making one phone that will also feature … Read more