ChrisRay, our hard working SLI Zone forum moderator, posted another review today of the GeForce 9800 GTX+.  Keep in mind Chris is just a hardware enthusiasts who posts what he thinks about ours products.  He is very honest with us and isn't afraid to gives us his opinion on new products.  Trust me, I have many emails from Chris calling a spade a spade ;)

One of the new things about this review from Chris is that he can now test and evaluate GPU accelerated NVIDIA PhysX on real games.  Chris measured Unreal Tournament 3 gameplay in his 9800 GTX+ review, and here was his conclusion:

Final Thoughts: All I can say is wow. This was just a single 9800 GTX. Not even with SLI and the performance improvement was substantial. And there no loss to actual rendering gameplay performance due to using the stream processors to process performance effects before the final rendering. If Nvidia can continue to deliver PhysX performance like this and change the way we perceive Physics..all I can say is "Sign me Up". It really is quite incredible. This is with a 200 Dollar CPU and a 200 dollar GPU.

The GeForce 9800 GTX+ is another solid edition to our product lineup.  Give Chris a hand and post your comments in the SLI Zone forum.

Yesterday we released the initial NVIDIA PhysX software for the end users.  This software kit adds support for hardware accelerated PhysX on the following GPUs: GeForce 9800 GTX, GeForce GTX 280, and GeForce GTX 260.

SLI end users have the flexibility to select different configurations for running PhysX and find which one provides the best balance of 3D graphics and PhysX performance.  Users can configure their GPUs to

• Work together in SLI mode,
• Have 3D graphics on one GPU and PhysX on the other (note wo GPUs max in this mode)

Please provide your feedback as you try PhysX!

Several users notified us that the Medusa demo was not running for them and we discovered the problem.  Under Windows Vista 64-bit our installer package just not including the C++ 2005 SP1 runtime needed to run the demo.

Simply download it, install it, and then install Medusa.  Please let us know your results!

For the record, I’ve become a complete hardware geek.

It started out last December when I built my first gaming rig and it culminated last week with overclocking and liquid nitrogen.

Think you need a quad-core CPU for an extreme gaming PC with impressive 3DMark Vantage numbers and gaming performance?  See for yourself by watching the video of how I overclocked and hyper-cooled an SLI® gaming rig using two of our latest and greatest GPUs—GeForce® GTX 280—an nForce® 790i Ultra SLI motherboard, and a sub-$200 CPU. Since I don’t have solid copper coldplates and liquid nitrogen underneath my kitchen sink—and I’m sure you don’t either!—I made an ultra-fun trip to the NVIDIA® labs for the hard-to-come-by but necessary ingredients and safety gear.

Since I’m sure you’ll ask what was in the system, here are the need-to-know specs:

• 2× NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280 graphics cards running in SLI
• nForce 790i Ultra SLI motherboard
• Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 CPU
• 4 GB SLI-ready Corsair DDR3 memory
• PC Power and Cooling TurboCool 1200W power supply
• Windows Vista 32-bit operating system

The standard clocks on a GeForce GTX 280 are 601 MHz core and 1,296 MHz shader, but I pushed them to 727 MHz and 1,458 MHz, respectively.  I also managed to get the GPUs cooled to a chilly -102.5 °C!

My results may not be as high as the Kingpin’s world-records, but they’re not too shabby!  Given that I had a lot of extra help and equipment, I will leave the record-breaking to the FutureMark Hall of Fame professionals.

One thing I missed yesterday was to let everyone know that the new technology demo for the GeForce GTX 200, Medusa, is now available to download. Medusa a NVIDIA's interpretation of the legendary snake-headed woman who's venomous gaze turned her victims to stone.  Having seen this demo live, its pretty cool and very compelling.  I am excited to see games utilize the new GPU architecture we launched.

• Medusa demo download
• Medusa video

As promised, our forum champ ChrisRay's review is online now.  Please give it a read and post your thoughts in the SLI Zone forums.

Today NVIDIA announced our new GeForce GTX 260 and GeForce GTX 280 GPUs.  The cards have been getting great reviews and I will post our forum champ ChrisRay's review later today.

However in the meantime I thought I'd call your attention to Vince "Kingpin" Lucido who got his hands on a 3-way SLI GeForce GTX 280 setup.  You know the drill, he mods it, overclocks it, and then benchmarks it.  His result? Over 17,000 at the Xtreme preset in 3dmark Vantage.  All I could say was wow when I saw that score!  Currently its over 2x over the latest 3dmark Vantage score. 

I think this is about a week old, but I thought I would post it anyway.

This is a video from a recent editor's event we held showing a transcoding application from Elemental Technologies called RapidHD running on a new GPU.  Please don't ask me the name of the GPU as its under NDA and can easily be found online. 

The video shows how the GPU, with its hundreds of computing cores, can transcode 720p HD video to iPod format in multiple times faster than real-time encoding on the CPU.  Elemental plans to create software as plugins that can be integrated into applications, such as Adobe Premiere® Pro, and will offer a revolutionary speed in performance over existing architectures.

Transcoding is something that I do on a daily basis and having seen the demo myself, I am blown away by it.  I can't wait for this application to hit the market and I am really excited for our end users to try it.

As many NVIDIA customers know, we try to offer GPU options and price points ranging from $59 GPUs all the way up to $599.  And anywhere in between, you can choose your form factor, whether its a add in graphics card, in your laptop, or a GPU installed directly on our motherboard.  We pride ourselves in having technology that enables people to an immerse, visual computing experience.  So its frustrating to me is that not all of the PCs in my life have NVIDIA GPUs so I can enable a great experience where ever I go. 

A great example for that is a new laptop that I have with integrated graphics in it (not NVIDIA's).  Basically its worthless to me to do anything except Excel, Powerpoint, Word, and Outlook.  You may wonder why I need anything else?  As a business traveler, I take this laptop to many countries.  I would love to to take my Blu-ray movies, play Call of Duty 4, or just edit my photos in Picasa on the road during some downtime in my hotel room. 

Sadly, it looks like I will never be able to game on this thing.  Its funny I was doing some web research to try to find some information on the DirectX 10 drivers for my laptop and I just got them, but I came across another blog from a year ago which made me chuckle.  Take a read for yourself.

Our local SLI Zone forum moderator, ChrisRay, posted his experiences with Hybrid SLI. 

If you have never read Chris' posts, its a good idea.  His posts are usally short, insightful, and to the point.  He will give his opinion as someone who is familiar with our technology, but is never afraid to be honest with us on our products.