Nvidia so far declined to provide any information if and when the company will consider support the DirectX 10.1 API in its GPUs, a technology that is integrated AMD’s Radeon cards for some time now. Roadmap information we stumbled across today offers a bit more clarity and suggests that the company’s next-generation desktop and notebook chips will support DirectX 10.1.

It appears that AMD’s ATI Radeon 4800 GPU has turned out to be a much better chip than initially expected and AMD’s aggressive pricing puts enough pressure on Nvidia to make price adjustments. If you are planning on purchasing a GTX 260 or 280 card, you may want to delay until next Monday. Price cuts are on the way.

Nvidia is admitting that some of its notebook chips are failing at “higher than normal rates” in a new filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.  The chip failures will cause Nvidia to take a $150 to $200 million charge this quarter to cover what it calls “warranty, repair and return and replacement” for laptop with unspecified Nvidia graphics chips and chipsets.  In after hours NASDAQ trading, Nvidia (stock symbol NVDA) plunged 21.94% or $3.95 to $14.08 a share.  The stock had been down as much as 25% after the close of regular trading on Wednesday July 2nd 2008.

AMD is kicking off the critical third quarter of 2008 with three new quad-core processors – two low-power models and a new high-end version for enthusiast PCs. The company maintains its mainstream pricing strategy and sells its new flagship for just few dollars more than what Intel charges for its entry-level quad-core CPU.

AMD’s Radeon 4850 and 4870 have been widely praised in the media and put the ATI team back on the map. But it appears that we have just seen a small portion of what the ATI guys have in space for users. The new boards are actually running at well below the clock speed they can support and there is every reason to believe that these cards will be challenging Nvidia’s very best.

Let’s be realistic, the glory days of Matrox and blockbuster graphics cards such as the legendary Millennium are over. But despite the rise of Nvidia and ATI, Matrox is still around and is catering to an industry running workstations and mission critical applications. The manufacturer recently introduced a handful of new cards that can run up to four LCDs, but come with prices that got us thinking.

Lenovo announced its first serious attempt to break into the consumer desktop PC market outside of China. And the result may look surprising to some: There is no cheap design here, the former IBM team actually has created a stylish PC that has all the genes to compete head-to-head with the top 3 PC vendors HP, Dell and Acer (Gateway).

At the moment, AMD GPG (former ATI Technologies) could be considered as the only division in AMD that is firing on all cylinders. The 7-series chipsets, the mobile Puma platform, XGP and the Radeon 4800 series are all fantastic products. The CPU division had less luck with its recent products, especially if you think about the underestimated competitive threat from Intel, the catastrophic Barcelona B2 revision and a 45 nm architecture that is about to miss its initial launch target. But things are changing and the company may be able to compete with Intel sooner than some may think.

Overclocking Macs is not really a topic you read very often about and at least to our knowledge, there is no tool to increase the clock speed of a Mac in a simple way. However, our colleagues from the German version of ZDNet have come up with a handy tool to overclock a Mac with Mac OS X Leopard that helps the cheapest Mac Pro to outrun the most expensive version. And yes, just in case you are wondering, there is a catch.

It appears that the buzz about 3D graphics has been focused on a feature that is not even integrate din today’s games – ray-tracing. Intel is beating the RT drum for its upcoming cGPU, which is still 18 months away. But it appears that Intel may be defeated in its own game, as AMD’s graphics chips are supporting a 100% ray-traced pipeline, TG Daily learned.