This enables gamers the use additional source of power for complex computing required for advanced shading technology Shader Model 5.0 and a rich array of new graphical effects.

The first model Radeon HD 5800 X2 is equipped with a Cypress graphics core, which can also be found on Radeon HD 5870. This means that freshman is crunching 3D models with 3200 stream processors, each at 850 MHz, helped by four gigabytes of graphics memory GDDR5 at 1,3 GHz.

The first dual GPU family of Radeon HD 5800 X2 will be sold by Club3D. Retail price for this graphic beast will be around 680 euros (999 usd). We estimate that by Christmas, when Nvidia also launches its DX11 graphics, and when shortage of RB870 is over, these cards will drop in price at least 40%.

The reason for the back cover stampings (which AMD was doing in the past only in the case of cooling hot memory chips and power supply components) hints on very high speed memory used, which also means that the card runs hot. Another interesting area is the core to the end of the card, which is usually intended to feeder components, as producers do not use long stampings, if this is not really necessary (its more expensive). Through four outputs, two DVI-D and HDMI and DisplayPort output, the card will be able to run three screens, which is a welcome addition to the more usual support for two displays. Given the size and shape of cutouts on the edge of the cooling system is expecting to supply two 6-pin PCIe connector.

It is still uncertain how much demand for DirectX 11 hardware there will be in short term, as Microsoft has quieted regarding subject (one might say that they learned from DX10 mistake in Vista and do not want to scare people off Windows 7 upgrade with talk of new hardware). Also there are no imminent DX11 games in sight. But from rumors we hear that ATI HD 5870 will excel in DirectX 10 games as well – way beyond what current generation can do… And with that in mind – we might see some new customer of ATI (Apple…)…

Release date of EverGreen is september 22nd, with press conference due to later today (september 10th). This is a hard launch, so expect cards in every retailed around October 1st!

Recently in a press release, the Blizzard Entertainment said that the subscriber base of World of Warcraft has touched another milestone of 12 million across the world.  This also gives a boost to their latest release of Wrath of the Lich King, World of Warcraft's which they released on November 13, 2008.

Although World of Warcraft was debuted only in November 2004, and has turned out to be the world’s favorite MMORPG till now.  WOW was also selected as the best selling game ever in 2005 and 2006.

Apart from this World of Warcraft also set its foot in Latin America and Russia recently and is the one of the few game which is available in around eight or more languages.

Out of this world popularity of WoW is also manifested with WoW Music Album – collection of songs, which is becoming popular within WoW community…

Blizzard declined to comment whether there will be a DirectX 10 or even DirectX 11 release of WoW – to boost the graphics to next level…

Image by Michael Simmons via Flickr

According to Jon Peddie Research (JPR), the GPU industry is still standing strong rising up in the market with impressive results. Desktop sales have increased every season as well as notebooks showing significant gains.

Among big playing GPU companies, Intel topped the market with 49.4% from last quarter’s 47.3%. Following Intel with the biggest growth this quarter is AMD with a 33.8$ gain from 18.1% from second quarter to 20.6% this quarter. NVIDIA, however, rose up to 4.4% for a market share of 27.8% in the third quarter of this year.

NVIDIA’s gains were caused by its coordination with Apple, replacing Intel’s chips in their MacBook systems. On the other hand, Intel promises to take back to business whatever NVIDIA has taken. Let’s see where the GPU stands in next quarters of this recession year.

From what we hear today, AMD is preparing its next generation GPU R800 (Radeon HD5xxx) for march – Cebit 2009 time frame, while Nvidia

should also follow close by – probably mid summer time… Intel’s larrabee gpu+cpu platform is still stated for end of 2009, with Intel denying any further comments and status updates…

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With a full system that performs discreetly in half the size of the previous GPUs, the NVIDIA 9400 and 9300 mGPUs have CUDA capability with 16 cores. NVIDIA even made a promise that these integrated GPUs have high technical specifications where you can play the latest and top of the line PC games and watch your favorite movies in high definition with its Blu-ray video capability.

According to Dr. Jon Peddie, these new GPUs gives NVIDIA more advantages that other graphical integrated chips. One of them is that the GeForce 9400 and 9300 mGPUs does a simpler processing that makes it user-friendly and also more practical when it comes to the price, just like what most buyers are expecting from the latest desktop PCs.

With NVIDIA’s Hybrid SLI technology, it gives higher performance boost of up to 70% higher than the motherboard GPU alone. Now that the new integrated GPU from has come, NVIDIA is expected to ship the new GPUs this month.

Larrabee provides practical solution to current limitations of GPUs. Larrabee does not special API for Larrabee, it works with current APIs for DirectX and OpenGL. Larrabee uses 1024-bit ring bus to transfer data efficiently and fast between gpu cores. All cores are true x86 processors, based on original Pentium architecture + many extensions and additions added to that base.

Larrabee is completely flexible and completely programmable, offering many optimization compared to existing technology and will revolutionize graphics industry. To paint this more plasticly - picture this - Larrabee gpu will be able to support DirectX 10, and then when released DirectX 11, and some years in future - DirectX 12 - yes on the same board…

Larrabee supports massive parallelism and scalability, which should be high-end GPU selling point probably (maybe not at the start). Memory technology used in final product was not yet reveled, but Intel's engineers say that there is no limitation to which memory technology can be used. Our sources indicated that GDDR5 will be used in final product, and very likely Intel will include 4 cores at entry level card, with high-end card's number yet undecided. But Intel's internal goal is to reach 2 teraflops of computing power. 

We hear that at least two big manufacturers (and from good relationship with Intel, we suspect that Gigabyte is one of them) will start offering Larrabee based graphisc boards from day zero - while other graphics cards manufacturers are being drafted by Intel as we speak (to angry the Nvidia for sure)… Anyhow, we heard that official release date for cards is June 1st 2009 - almost a year from now… (hopefully intel will be able to push this date closer to now).

Developers who were revealed more architecture details, were very pleased as Intel would like us to believe.

More information on Larrabee will follow soon - on august 4th, but collective info is available on wikipedia.

Even though DirectX 10 is still quite fresh in developers and casual gamer's minds, Microsoft are already making a push to bring more advancements in the form of DirectX 11.

The company has today announced some initial details. One particular and expected highlight of DX11 is tessellation support which as far as I know is already being used in current-gen consoles such as the 360. It blurs the line between super high quality pre-rendered scenes and scenes rendered in real-time, allowing game developers to refine models to be smoother and more attractive when seen up close. There are a number of other interesting additions MS is working on for the new API. This in a shell means that DX11 hardware will be quite different from DX10, as new features will be mandatory done in hardware. As for the tessalation unit goes, ATI is already supporting it from Radeon HD 2600 onwards..

Changes will also ba made in full support (including all DX11 hardware features) on Windows Vista as well as future versions of Windows:

•  Compatibility with DirectX 10 and 10.1 hardware, as well as support for new DirectX 11 hardware
•  New compute shader technology that lays the groundwork for the GPU to be used for more than just 3D graphics, so that developers can take advantage of the graphics card as a parallel processor
• Multi-threaded resource handling that will allow games to better take advantage of multi-core machines It also goes without saying that XP users will be left out in the cold on this one.

You can read more here.

According to Crytek, will assume the role of Sergeant Sykes in Crysis Warhead and experience his “parallel story during the events of the original game, finding that life on the other side of the island is even more intense and explosive than they ever could have imagined.”

The game will be available for PC this fall. Rumor has it that Warhead will be Crysis Warhead will be Crytek's last PC-only game, as company intends to slowly shift focus towards gaming consoles… As Crytek is powerful in DirectX programming, it is speculated extension to Xbox 360 and its successor, while it is still unclear if company will produce a PS3 version as well…