According to VR-Zone, ForceWare 174.xx drivers confirm the upcoming arrival of the G98, which you may recall, will replace the G86 that is found in the GeForce 8400. The good news is that Nvidia has finally opted for the GeForce 9400 and will not as it was at one time assumed maintain the GeForce 8400. Non official ForceWare 171.23 attests to this. You may recall, it will be engraved in 65nm making it more competitive than its 80nm predecessor which is competing with the 55nm RV620. The memory bus is still 64 bits wide but there should now be a Purevideo 3 engine enabling more VC-1 decoding.

	During the conference call for the announcement of quarterly and yearly results with financial analysts, Nvidia’s CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang, specified his company’s intentions regarding the future of AGEIA’s PhysX engine. The Californian firm plans on developing a CUDA version of the PhysX engine in addition to the CPU version. It remains unknown however when this will arrive and with which GPUs (current or future ones) it will function. Furthermore, we should remember that the Physx engine has (almost) nothing to do with the PPU which only accelerates a PhysX plugin. At any rate, M. Huang hopes this will encourage users to buy two or even three GPUs (two for graphics and one for physics or the opposite).

	Today, S3 Graphics, a subsidiary of VIA, has officially unveiled the Chrome 430 and 440, which were created to give game and HD media playing capacities to PC desktops and laptops with the highest performance-per-watt ratio ever attained. Expected out at the end of the month, they are engraved in 65nm by Fujitsu and support the DirectX 10.1’s Shader Model 4.1, OpenGL 2.1, and PCI-Express 2.0. In addition, the ChromotionHD engine will take into account the most recent HD standards such as H.264, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, VC-1, WMV-HD, and AVS. As for display interfaces, there will be HDMI, dual-link DVI, DisplayPort, HDTV and VGA. In terms of 3D performances, we shouldn’t expect miracles from a memory bus with a width of 64 bits. Note that the presence of AcceleRAM technology, which uses a similar technique to TurboCache and HyperMemory, enables the graphic card to utilize central memory as video memory via the PCI-Express in parallel to its own local video memory. The prices and frequencies were not given and the potential release of the Chrome 460 was not confirmed.