Video Cards

The new VIA VX800 Series of digital media IGP chipsets featuring the latest video, graphics and connectivity performance in a single chip measuring just 33 x 33mm, from VIA Technologies, Inc.

The VIA VX800 Series comprises two primary digital media IGP chipsets, the VIA VX800 for ultra thin and light notebooks, mini PCs and embedded devices, and the ultra low voltage VIA VX800U for the fast-expanding ultra mobile market, including the rapidly-emerging mini-note, UMPC and UMD markets.

The first commercially available 3D workstation graphics card with DisplayPort support. The ATI FireGL™ V7700 professional graphics accelerator provides superior rendering speed, 3D performance and color fidelity for Computer Aided Design (CAD), Digital Content Creation (DCC) and Medical Imaging professionals. ATI FireGL V7700 delivers the top-quality image quality needed to create photorealistic visualizations of real-world objects and environments —like the design concept for a new aircraft or a home remodel—by providing designers with The Ultimate Visual Experience™.

The new ATI Radeon™ HD 3400 and ATI Radeon™ HD 3600 series are leading-edge entry-level and mainstream graphics processors (GPU) in the ATI Radeon™ HD 3000 series. Ranging in price from USD $49-$65 suggested e-tail pricing (SEP) for the ATI Radeon HD 3400 series and USD $79-$99 SEP for the ATI Radeon HD 3600 seriesi. Both series deliver display connectivity through DisplayPort™ integrated into the GPUii. As part of the first family of graphics cards built using 55nm process technologyiii, both series provide exceptional performance-per-watt for a quiet and power-efficient experience at unbelievable price points.

The ATI Radeon™ HD 3800 Series of graphics processing units (GPU) has been released by AMD. Using 55nm process technology and tri and quad multi-GPU support with ATI CrossFireX™, the series comes in at mainstream price points. The series will be introduced in two variants at launch, from US $179 MSRP, the ATI Radeon™ HD 3850 with 256MB of GDDR3 memory and from US $219 MSRP, the ATI Radeon™ HD 3870 with 512MB GDDR4 memory.

AMD (NYSE: AMD) is expanding its TV Wonder™ product lineup that enables HDTV on the PC.

The TV Wonder 650 Combo USB, with a manufacturers suggested retail price (MSRP) of $149, includes two TV tuners allowing users to watch and record off-the-air Digital TV/HDTV, unencrypted Digital TV (ClearQAM) cable programming, analog TV, and listen to FM broadcasts. TV Wonder 600 PCI and TV Wonder 600 PCI Express TV tuners break new ground by offering ClearQAM at a value of $99 MSRP.

AMD (NYSE: AMD) has a major strategic initiative to support the Open Source development community for ATI Radeon™ graphics processors. The week of September 10th, AMD plans to provide an open source information and development package supporting the ATI Radeon™ HD 2000 series as well as ATI Radeon™ X1000 series of graphics processing units (GPU) on Linux desktops. To accelerate this initiative, AMD partnered with Novell’s SuSE Linux engineering team. The initial release includes source code and hardware specifications to engage the Open Source community for collaboration on 2D graphics drivers. Over the following months, AMD will work with the community to enable 2D, 3D and video playback acceleration to provide the best possible experience on the Linux desktop. This strategy complements and enhances AMD's existing support of the Linux community through its regularly released high performance Catalyst driver.

AMD (NYSE: AMD) has plans for major enhancements to performance and compatibility for ATI Radeon™ graphics for Linux users. These improvements are planned for subsequent releases of ATI’s Catalyst™ software package beginning in early September. AMD also plans to accelerate efforts to address the needs of the open source community as well.

With the forthcoming Catalyst 7.9 software release in September, AMD will add Linux support for the ATI Radeon™ HD 2000 series of graphics processors. The Radeon HD 2000 series offer a number of compelling new features for Linux users including AMD’s patented unified shader architecture.

AMD has five new high-performance ATI FireGL™ workstation graphics accelerators for CAD, DCC and medical imaging professionals. The ATI FireGL V8650, FireGL V8600, FireGL V7600, FireGL V5600, and FireGL V3600 graphics boards are based on the next-generation ATI graphics processing unit (GPU) with an innovative unified shader architecture featuring up to 320 individual stream processing units. These new boards deliver acceleration of DirectX® 10- and OpenGL 2.1-based professional applications resulting in increased performance of more than 300% as compared to the previous generation of product.

AMD has successfully tested interoperability of a next-generation graphics processor with a native DisplayPort™ 1.1 transmitter. The testing was completed with a Genesis Microchip DisplayPort receiver.

A breakthrough technology, DisplayPort, aims to unify and standardize display across the desktop and notebook computing environments through a common high-bandwidth interconnect. ATI Radeon™ graphics were first to integrate other display technologies such as high-definition multimedia interface (HDMI) and digital visual interface (DVI). DisplayPort interfaces are expected to be natively supported in ATI Radeon graphics processors in the early 2008 timeframe.

GDDR4 (Graphics Double Data Rate, version 4) high-speed graphics memory chip, from Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., are being used in both the 1GB ATI Radeon™ HD 2900 XT and the 256MB ATI Radeon™ HD 2600 XT graphics processing cards. The 1GB card has the widest bus in the industry designed for full-performance, high dynamic range (HDR) rendering in PCs.