I am sure that soon, we'll be able to play Crysis in full graphics glory on our 37-inch LCDs, but that moment has not arrived yet. I don't know why, but I can feel the ATI HD4xxx series will blow NVIDIA away... Anyway, don't take that for granted - it's just my wild guess. Until then, we have two new graphics monsters from NVIDIA, released earlier today - the GTX260 and the GTX280!

While the G80 chip has 128 shader processors and 681 million transistors, the new GT200 comes with no less than 1.4 billion transistors and 192/240(GTX260/GX280) processing units. The interesting part is that these enthusiast-level graphics cards will eat up to 182/236 watts, which is pretty impressive, but wait until we get to the technical specifications!

Oook, here you go: GTX280 - 1296 MHz core, 1107 MHz memory, 1024 MB memory capacity, and 933 GFlops processing power, no less than 80% more than the 8800 GTX (518 GFlops); GTX260 - 1242 MHz core, 999 MHz memory and 896 MB of memory. To make things even more interesting, both the GTX260 and GTX280 support 3-way SLI configurations!

Expected to become available starting June 26 for $399 MSRP(GTX260) and $649(GTX280), the graphics cards integrating these two GPUs will surely deal a blow to the 9800 GX2 and AMD's HD 3870 X2, but that's only true for those looking to get highest performance possible, without looking at the price. "Bang per buck"-wise, there are plenty of better solutions allowing you to play the latest games without problems.

Despite the fact AMD is being owned by Intel when it comes to desktop processors, it's good to see they are still able to work together. How's that? Well, AMD and Havok, a wholly owned subsidiary of Intel Corp. said they are working together to optimize the Havok physics engine for AMD's processors, as well as trying to do the same thing for the ATI GPUs. Challenging enough?

According to Rick Bergman, AMD's senior vice president and general manager of graphics products group, "As the complexity and visual fidelity of video games increases, AMD wants to take advantage of opportunities to improve the game experience. By working with the clear market leader in physics software, AMD can optimize our platforms to consistently deliver the best possible visual experience to the gamer."

While planning to optimize all Havok technologies for AMD x86 superscalar processors, AMD and Havok are also into using the ATI Radeon GPUs to get closer to various aspects of real-world physics simulation in the future.

What about Ageia? Well, their legacy remains with NVIDIA, and by 2010, I am sure we'll see fights over the physics acceleration field between NVIDIA and AMD & Havok.

Before being acquired by Intel, Havok was working on a physics engine called Havok FX, able to work directly with GPUs for performing physics calculations, but that project was stopped since then. According to Davio O'Meara, Havok's managing director, "The feedback that we consistently receive from leading game developers is that core game play simulation should be performed on CPU cores. The clear priority of game developers is performance and scalability on of the CPU. Beyond core simulation, however, the capabilities of massively parallel products offer technical possibilities for computing certain types of simulation. We look forward to working with AMD to explore these possibilities."

It's always good to see there is a way for enemies to work together, although this is not as interesting as Intel and AMD working together on a CPU, for example(yeah, right!).

Two years ago, both AMD/ATI and NVIDIA realized that GP-GPU (general purpose graphics processing unit) architectures could provide immense processing power, since GPUs are way ahead of CPUs when it comes to crunching numbers and huge amounts of data. NVIDIA came with CUDA last year, and AMD announced that it would release its own GP-GPU architecture codenamed FireStream, although AMD also intends to fuse GPUs with CPUs. AMD launched the FireStream 9170 without making much of a fuss, but it looks like they are ready to launch the second generation, as they have made an official announcement at the International Supercomputing Conference.

Known as the FireStream 9250, the GP-GPU card is specifically designed to accelerate critical algorithms in high-performance computing (HPC), mainstream and consumer applications. The press release informs that the FireStream 9250 easily breaks the one teraflop barrier for single precision performance. It occupies a single PCI slot, for unmatched density and with power consumption of less than 150 watts. This way, AMD’s GP-GPU solution reaches one of the highest performance/watt efficiency with up to eight gigaflops per watt.

The FireStream architecture may be used to calculate financial analyses or seismic predictions faster than with CPU alone. Preliminary tests have shown that there could be 55x performance increases on financial analysis codes as compared to processing on the CPU alone, which supports the efforts to make better and faster decisions.

The AMD FireStream 9250 stream processor includes a second-generation double-precision floating point hardware (the first came with the 9170 model) and its compact size makes it ideal for small 1U servers as well as most desktop systems, workstations, and larger servers. The FireStream-powered cards also feature 1GB of GDDR3 memory, enabling developers to handle large, complex problems.

FireStream 9250, as well as a new SDK are expected to be available in Q3 2008 at an MSRP of $999 USD.

Ageia PhysX was supposed to bring a whole new dimension to video games. Unfortunately, the physics accelerator wasn’t embraced by many game developers. Moreover, NVIDIA and ATI claimed that they could easily handle elaborated physics instructions. This was supposed to be possible if a high-end graphics card was to be paired with a low-end one that could act like a Physics Processing Unit. Ultimately, Ageia was bought by NVIDIA and people thought that this technology will be slowly buried. Unlike many NVIDIA takeovers that only concentrated on eliminating the competition, this time, it looks like NVIDIA really wants to continue what Ageia started several years ago.

Fudzilla informs that it has been confirmed by high ranked NVIDIA executives that a PhysX driver for the Geforce 8 and 9 GPUs will come a few weeks after the official release of the GTX 280 and 260 cards. As you might know by now, these two flagship cards are about to be launched next week. That means that he PhysX driver will follow a few weeks after, some time in July. The physics functions will be supported via the CUDA architecture.

Additionally, it seems that all PhysX enabled games that have been launched in the past couple of years, including GRAW and Unreal tournament 3 will work with PhysX over GPU and you won't need Ageia card anymore to get the benefits. NVIDIA claims that there will even be performance gains over the Ageia cards.

Many people who want to build a PC system on their own are forgetting to buy a good PSU. If you’re planning to build a powerful rig which is to be further overclocked, a good PSU is even more important. Plus, when you know a Crossfire or SLI configuration is about to be unleashed inside your rig, you should also consider a powerful and energy efficient PSU, as well. There are several good PSU makers out there, and among these, Cooler Master is considered to be a newcomer. In case you need to buy a good PSU, you might want to take a look at what Cooler Master has in store for you.

Cooler Master has recently announced the updated Silent Pro PSU series. The new series will feature an improved circuit design that will offer more than 85% power efficiency. Keep in mind that all the PSU that have an 80%+ power efficiency are considered to be best suited for power-hungry rigs.

Thanks to the 135mm fan installed inside the PSU, the airflow should be increased 1.5 times, but the noise output is said to be kept at low levels. The fan was also connected to an intelligent fan controller that adjusts the speed based on the temperature.

The improved Silent Pro series will feature additional silicon rubber pads which are supposed to further silence the PSU by removing vibrations. As with any performance-oriented PSU, the new Silent Pro series will feature a modular cable system with flat modular cabling. These PSUs are compliant with Intel's ATX 12V v2.3 standard and use Japanese-made capacitors.

No word on capacity, availability and pricing as of yet.