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Crysis

Nvidia Ion – Play Call of Duty on Your Netbook

by Jay Garrett on December 19, 2008

nvidia_netbook_ionIf you opt for a netbook you do so with the knowledge that it will crumble when faced with Crysis, Left4Dead and the likes.

Well, Nvidia plans to introduce “chip technology” that could allow low-cost netbooks run those lovely high-def games and media.

The Ion platform, announced on Thursday, effectively combines Nvidia’s GeForce 9400 graphics processing unit (GPU) with Intel’s Atom chipset. According to Nvidia, this combination will provide “up to ten times the graphics performance” of other graphics chipsets currently used with Atom in small, low-cost PCs.

The GeForce 9400 has 16 processing cores and is more than suited for graphics-intensive apps such as Adobe’s Photoshop CS4.

It’s already chugging under the hood of Apple’s latest MacBook, MacBook Pro and MacBook Air.

“Until now, a high-definition, affordable PC was an oxymoron,” said Drew Henry, general manager of Nvidia’s media communications processor business unit, in Thursday’s statement. “The Ion platform pairs the GeForce 9400 with a truly great Intel Atom CPU and lets consumers surf the Internet, play top games, edit photos and watch videos — all in high definition.”

Nvidia said that the new Ion platform will be designed to support the full Windows Vista user interface, however, and the upcoming Windows 7.  That news may be exciting to some of you I guess……….

In addition, it will be capable of running “full-spec 1,080 [pixels]” high-definition video and games as graphically intensive as Call of Duty 4.

According to Nvidia, “the GeForce 9400 GPU does all of this in about half of the space of today’s Atom CPU-based solutions, with minimal effect on battery life”.

The Ion platform will also let netbook users experience full Blu-ray playback on the smallest PCs and laptops, according to Alice Chang, chief executive of optical-drive maker CyberLink, who was quoted in Nvidia’s statement.

A spokesperson for Nvidia told ZDNet UK yesterday that the company expects manufacturers to offer netbooks using Ion sometime towards the end of the first half of 2009.

Portable gaming a-go-go! FTW! :)

Znet

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EA and 2K Games Join NVIDIA Camp

by Jay Garrett on December 9, 2008

AMD and NVIDIA are still thrashing out who is the bestest in the video card business.

NVIDIA is making a strong stand with its latest move.

Nope, it isn’t based on more frames per second.  This time NVIDIA are concentrating on getting friends in high places.

EA and 2K Games (creators of Bioshock) have both agreed to use NVIDIA’s PhysX technology to drive their physics engines in upcoming games.

I know what you’re thinking:  “So, what? A couple of big hitters have licensed somebody or others tech. How does that touch me?”

Well, if you’re loving your PC gaming then it might make sense to get some GeForce under the hood if you haven’t already!

Take into account that there’s been some pretty spanky performance incresases and the fact that AMD needed a bit of a tax break recently it would be smart to go the GeForce way.

We all like leaves moving when we brush past them in gaming worlds such as Crysis and physics simulation is becoming a must have feature in games so developers are going to be relying more on hybrid technology like PhysX in order to make sure that their games are running nice and smooooooth.

I think it’s safe to say that both ‘Bioshock 2′ and the ‘Crysis’ follow-up are going to run best on a GeForce-based system.

So. You know what you need ;)

CrunchGear

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