ATI videocard owners take note - AMD has released new Catalyst drivers, v8.12, for both Windows XP and Vista. The new Catalyst release brings with it performance improvements in several DX9 and DX10 games, including up to a 25 percent boost in Crysis (DX10) for both Single and Crossfire mode. More recent releases, such as Left 4 Dead and Fallout 3, also receive a claimed performance boost by up to 10 percent and 15 percent respectively.

Many bug fixes accompany 8.12, such as improved HD video playback no longer causing Vista to stop responding, better support for connectingan All-in-Wonder card to a Yamaha receiver via an HDMI cable, and several more.

The new drivers also unlock the ATI Stream compute acceleration capabilities built into Radeon HD 3870, HD 3870 X2, and all HD 4000 series graphics cards. Similar to Nvidia's CUDA technology, ATI Stream is a set of advanced hardware and software technologies that enable AMD GPUs to work with the CPU and accelerate applications other than just graphics. To show off the technology, AMD has made available its free ATI Video Converter utility.

Nividia today announced its Quadro FX 5800 videocard calling it "the most powerful professional graphics card in graphics history." To help justify such a big claim, Nvidia slapped a big 4GB frame buffer on the new videocard, more than any other videocard to date.

"The size and complexity of data is growing at an exponential rate," said Jeff Brown, general manager, Professional Solutions, Nvidia. "The challenge for today's professional is to make sense of the mountain of data by distilling it into a form they can comprehend, analyze, and use to make impactful decisions. At stake can be billions of investment dollars, or even people's lives. The Quadro FX 5800 has advanced features to allow massive datasets to be viewed beyond traditional 3D enabling professionals to make fast and accurate decisions."Nvidia says its new videocard is a perfect match for oil and gas exploration, medical imaging, styling and design, and scientific visualization, all of which can benefit from the large amount of memory and up to 240 CUDA programmable parallel core. Other specs include a memory bandwidth of up to 102 GB/s, a fill rate claimed to exceed 52 billion texels per second, and geometry performance of 300 million triangles per second. The Quadro FX 5800 also boasts true 10-bit color, giving it the ability to enable billions of color variations instead of millions, according to Nvidia.

The Quadro FX 5800 is available now with an MSRP set at $3500. But if it helps, think of it as less than $1000 per GB of memory.

Although NVIDIA's new low-profile GeForce 9400 graphics card has been officially announced for quite some time now, one of its add-in-board partners decided to keep its customers waiting for a while. However, the company has officially launched its version of the new GeForce graphics card earlier today, offering four new models, based on the same GPU.

As we mentioned in our previous articles, NVIDIA's new GeForce 9400 card has been designed to accommodate the graphics requirements of entry-level users who don't spend their entire budget on just one video card. In addition, the GeForce 9400 GT features several NVIDIA technologies and supports Microsoft's DirectX 10 API. Furthermore, this is also one of the few NVIDIA cards that have been developed using a 55nm process technology, which AMD has been adopting for quite some time now.Back to Sapphire's latest GeForce cards, the four new models have been designed to deliver a maximum of 1GB of DDR2 memory. However, two of them will be equipped with only 512MB DDR2 memory on a 128-bit memory interface. There is another way you can differentiate the four models from one another, as the two 1GB DDR2-enabled cards are equipped with a passive cooling solution. All four of them are based on PCI-Express 2.0 interface and have the same clock settings as the reference model, with 550MHz for the GPU and 800MHz for the memory.

In addition to the new GeForce 9400GT models, Sparkle can also offer four GDDR3-equipped cards, all of which have only 512MB of memory. In total, Sparkle has 12 graphics cards, based on the same 9400GT GPU. So we could say that if you are an entry-level user and you are searching for a new low-profile graphics card, you should find what you are searching for in Sapphire's product lineup.

Oops! Elsa, a supplier of Nvidia-based graphics cards, recently showed some slides during a press event outlining Nvidia's enthusiast product roadmap, one of which has been leaked and is spreading through the web. The slide appears to show Nvidia readying two new high end GPUs set to launch later this year and in Q1 '09.

The GT212 looks to replace the GTX280 on the top of the GPU food chain, with the GT206 replacing the GTX260. What's interesting about the new cards is that the naming schemes would appear to position them below the cards each one is replacing, but the leaked slide clearly shows both higher up on the performance scale. Speculation suggests the new cards will likely see a die shrinkThe slide also shows another 9800GTX+ (HDV version) to be released this quarter, but like the others, specifics so far remain scarce.