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No one’s talking about it and while I haven’t had the chance to test it myself a number of people have confirmed that in CrossFireX setups Eyefinity performance has really skyrocketed. In most situations you’re talking about going from not playable to playable.

One person reported that Metro 2033 went form a slide show to an average of 130 FPS.

Metro 2033 has copped a pretty bad rap since launch since most enthusiasts are using ATI cards and the game has struggled with the setups, that could all about to change now.

If you’re running Eyefinity and a CrossFireX setup feel free to drop a line down the bottom and let us know you’re experience with it. I’ll be sure to check it out myself sooner rather than later.

Make sure you go grab the latest 10.5 Drivers from the game.amd.com website here.

If you find yourself wanting to get into the GTX 400 series fun but disappointed with the high price tag of the current top two models good news is just around the corner. Well to be more precise good news is in the paragraph below but owning one is just around the corner.

The GTX 465 which some people thought would be known as the GTX 460 is due to come out on the 1st of June. Details on the model are a bit sketchy at the moment with very little known. What I can tell you thought is that stock doesn’t look like it’s going to be an issue.

With the model still weeks away we’ve been told by multiple manufacteres that they already have stock and samples will be ready to ship this week.

What this means is that we’ll probably start seeing leaked results show up in the next week but please remember with so long before the official launch date a new driver helping performance shouldn’t be far off. I know once I get mine it won’t be slid into the testbed till closer to launch just to make sure we’re using the most up to date driver.

GTX 400 series has started arriving at manufactures; no doubt in the next day or two they’ll begin to ship out to wholesalers around the world. It’s become clear though that partners aren’t happy with the stock they received with one saying to me:

“the shipment should be arrived by today… just a few …not enough to sell”

While we’ve got a GTX 480 sample on its way now we’re not sure how the retail market is going to go with supply. No doubt majority of the stock will be spread across Asia, America and Europe it’ll be interesting to see how many come down under in Australia.

I hope you’re not in too much of a rush to pick up a GTX 400 series card; no doubt the decision for some companies to increase the price on high end Radeon models was smart as they’re making more money than ever.

I’ve got an Eyefinity6 card at the moment but am yet to receive an active DVI adapter since what I really want to do with the card is compare it to the HD 5870 1GB at 2560 x 1600 to see just how much the extra memory helps.

Doing some research and talking to partners though it’s clear that they’re preparing to make a HD 5870 2GB; when we say HD 5870 2GB how this differs to the Eyefinity6 is that the card will carry the standard two Dual-Link DVI connectors, HDMI and single DisplayPort for support up to three monitors.

Why we haven’t seen the model yet though? It’s clearly because of stock being an issue for many months with cards becoming really available only now.

As for an ETA there’s no 100% date but I’ve been told it won’t be far away.

I absolutely love that the GTX 400 series is around the corner; and if you have no intension of buying one as you enjoy the high end ATI setup you already have; you should as well since ATI have held nothing back in the driver department lately.

The latest area to get shown love by the Catalyst Driver Team is the new Cross Profiles which will have their first update Monday.

Below is a list of what will be improved when you install the profile:

Heaven – Crossfire profile
Dark Void – Crossfire profile
Singularity – Crossfire profile
Unigine Heaven Demo – Crossfire profile
Just Cause 2 -> Single GPU and Crossfire profile
Battlefield Bad Company 2 -> Crossfire profile
AvP -> Single GPU and Crossfire profile

Ouch! I feel bad for NVIDIA who have chosen to send only one GTX 400 sample to myself and the decision to make it the slower one of the two new models. I think it’s going to look pretty unattractive against a sea of red.

At the moment I’ve only managed to lock in a GTX 470 from NVIDIA directly who have said that getting a GTX 480 isn’t possible due to short supply. That’s fine; I can understand that. So I do what I always do at launch, chase a couple of manufactures for stock and get some retail samples.

I had one company commit to sending the GTX 470 and GTX 480 2 weeks ago but with cards only shipping between the 15th and 19th they didn’t feel they would be able to send me full retail packaging. That’s fine but today being the 19th factories in Taiwan and Honk Kong are still high and dry with no stock, making it at the moment impossible to lock down any retail samples.

Word going around is that the review date has been pushed back to as early as the 29th of March or as late as April 9th which we where first told was just going to be the retail date.

I’ve got a con call with NVIDIA in 10 hours and while we’re under NDA there should still be information I can tell you. Either way I’ll be sure to keep everyone in the loop.

ATI are really on the ball lately; they’re not about to sit on their morals though and hope that the HD 5970 is going to get them through the green minefield that is going to be laid soon. The 10.3 driver set was already looking promising for people with Eyefinity thanks to some good features being implemented; yesterday though AMD dropped a bomb shell when it came to performance improvements of what was being offered in the new driver.

If you don’t know what’s on offer I recommend you check out my blog post from yesterday here.

Instead of making us wait around for a WHQL driver though they’ve thrown the preview driver up giving people the chance to get in on the party now.

You can grab the driver here; of course it’s a beta so blah blah blah it’s at your own risk and what not but I’ve been using it for the past 24 hours and haven’t experienced any problems, let’s just say that the fan hasn’t stopped running on my card and died in Starcraft.

Anyway grab the driver and keep an eye out on TweakTown for a preview of it on a number of ATIs HD 5800 series cards.

There’s good news and bad news; the bad news is that the GTX 400 series has been pushed back to April 6th. The good news is that it’s only in reference to retail supply and not the actual NDA; so come the 26th of March we’ll all know what performance will be.

If you thought that you were going to pick one up retail that day though you where wrong, the original date for stock to be selling was the 29th but now it seems to be April 6th.

This morning we heard that NVIDIA had changed the strategy for sending samples; instead of partners sending them out NVIDIA are taking charge and sending out themselves. We’re not 100% sure why they’re doing this but it could be because NVIDIA doesn’t want any leaks on the results until the 26th. Quite often we see NVIDIA push a driver to us at the last minute and it’s possible that this could happen with the GTX 400 series.

If performance numbers come out on an older driver it’s possible that performance won’t be as good and in turn could seal the fate of the new series before it’s even officially released. Holding cards back from its partners though until launch means that it’s going to take a little longer for the cards to hit retail.

So while it’s not great news in the event you want to pick up a GTX 480 on the 26th it doesn’t change the fact that come 10 days time we’ll know how the model performs.

It seems that someone on the EVGA forums asked to see the EVGA GTX 480 and GTX 470 box after seeing the Galaxy one on here. Well sometimes all you have to do is ask with it then being posted on the TEAMEVGA’s flickr page.

While we’re not seeing anything too different as opposed to the other box arts we’ve seen this particular one does make note of not only 3D Vision but 3D Vision Surround. While we knew it was coming with it being in NVIDIAs own GT 100 white paper it’s nice to see that a company is going to be promoting it on the front of the box.

As usual you’ve got the other information you’re use to seeing like memory size, PHYSX support, CUDA and SLI.

If we can’t see the performance of the card we may as well have a look at some boxes.

This afternoon out of nowhere I had a couple of renders show up in my inbox of the Galaxy GTX 400 boxes. Seems that someone didn’t want to be left out after seeing the Gigabyte ones posted earlier.

This time we’ve got both the GTX 470 and GTX 480 and both have come from a good source so it’s probably very safe to assume that they’re spot on. In typical fashion the Galaxy boxes aren’t all that exciting but give you the details that you need to know.

At the end of it all we want what’s in the box more so then anything but we can see that the GTX 480 carries with it 1536MB of GDDR5 memory while the lower end GTX 470 carries 1280MB of GDDR5 memory. The unusual numbers are of course due to the memory bus width.

Anyway have a look below to have closer look at what exactly we’re dealing with.