- Radeon 9800XT at Alcatraz

In one of the most creative and what will probably be one of the most exciting product launches of some time, ATI will launch their upcoming Radeon 9800XT graphics card, along with Half Life 2 by Valve, on the 30th of this month at the old Alcatraz prison near San Francisco according to The INQ.

ATI'S long awaited card that is expected to take the performance lead in the increasingly bitter graphics battle, is to be launched in Alcatraz, the former prison just a wave away from freedom-loving city San Francisco.

- The way it's meant to be hidden?

Gamer's Depot are reporting that nVidia convinced Eidos, the makers of Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness, to pull a patch for the said DX9 game which allows users to benchmark, presumably because ATI has better DX9 performance than nVidia currently.

EIDOS Interactive, the publisher for Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness issued a patch a couple of weeks ago for the game which happened to include a way to use the game as a DX9 benchmark. Since it shows NVIDIA hardware performing slower than ATI, EIDOS has pulled it down. Remember, this is a "Way it's meant to be played" game, which means NVIDIA has paid EIDOS marketing money. Keep in mind, that this patch improved performance on both ATI and NVIDIA hardware.

- Pentium 4 Extreme Edition

All the talk right now is about Pentium 4 Extreme Edition which was apparently shown at the Intel Developer Forum today in the United States. It's a regular Pentium 4 with an extra 2MB cache. Is Intel beginning to fear the Athlon 64? The INQ doesn't mention it, but they do have the scoop on the new CPU.

WHEN, AT today's IDF opening, Louis Burns demonstrated a high-definition video stream running on a "mystery" desktop processor, everyone must hve thought it was the upcoming Prescott part. Wrong! It was the (also upcoming), previously unheard of, even at The Inq, Intel® Pentium® 4 processor Extreme Edition 3.20 GHz , with an extra 2 Megabytes. In Intel's own words, "this new processor will be targeted at high-end gamers and computing power users."

- ATI Catalyst 3.8 Update

Rage 3D has an update on ATI's upcoming Catalyst 3.8 drivers direct from the keyboard of Terry Makedon from ATI.

Hi guys,
Wanted to pop in here just for a quick comment.
I have had many, many emails and PM's asking about CATALYST 3.8. People are wondering if they are going to be a big performance set of drivers. The answer as I have always stated is NO.

CATALYST 3.8 is going to be very significant because it will have lots of new features and new versions of most of the software componenets in the CATALYST suite (drivers, MMC, HV).

So to summarize we have been spending our time recently (past few drivers) on stability improvements. And the next one will be heavy on the new cool features.

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