In a string of luck, AMD's best graphics solution for this season comes a good three weeks before Spore and Crysis Warhead has a chance to whisper, "Peek-a-boo!" You can bet that every brand out there who's been sticking with ATI video cards has a special kit for you bleeding edge techies, but just how much moolah are we going to shell out for a Radeon HD 4870 X2? Learn more at the full story.

Using a naming convention that will keep fans swapping "GTX" side to side, NVIDIA's newest generation of video cards has just been announced over press waves. The GeForce GTX 280 and the GTX 260 are the initial models pushed out by the graphics manufacturing company for the new line known officially as the GTX 200 (note how the GTX prefixes the model numbers). This new family is an old idea improved - it's based on similar G80 architecture, but significantly improved in computing power. More details can be had at the full story.

Upgrading your PC can be a very complicated thing, but it seems that NVIDIA is going to try and make things just a bit more customer-friendly, and how Content Business Development VP Roy Taylor thinks that it's a challenge for the company to overcome. Here's hoping that they do manage to pull this one off. Check out all the details in the full article, and see what this one means to you.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl developer GSC Game World has decided to play twenty questions and answer just some of the fan feedback they've been receiving on the sequel of their well-loved FPS series. The Community Q&A session tackled the development of its upcoming S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky as well as other interesting issues.

Read more about what the developers had to say in the full article after the jump!

 

GameInformer has scored a few more bits of information regarding the Half-Life 2 Orange and Black Boxes. According to the website, Valve's Doug Lombardi clarified that console users will only be able to purchase the Orange Box, while PC users have a choice between the two.

Both the Orange and Black Box editions of Half-Life will be available at either retails stores or via Steam (for PC users only, of course). When these editions launch, you won't be able to buy the contents separately. You'll have to buy the whole package.

Speaking of consoles, a Wii release from Valve is also something that has sparked a lot of fan discussion. While Valve currently has no Wii projects in development, Lombardi stressed that "the company was quite surprised by the interface and wouldn't rule out anything just yet."

Lombardi also cleared things up regarding the delays that have surrounded Half-Life 2: Episode 2. While a lot of people believed that the next installment was delayed to include the two other games, Lombardi said that this wasn't the case. According to Lombardi, "Nothing is done yet. Portal is the closest, but it's not done today."

Those who have already upgraded their PCs' video cards to support Direct X 10 will also be happy to find out that both Episode 2 and Team Fortress 2 will support Direct X 10. Valve also plans to include Direct X 8 support, and the company is also planning to support the older Direct X 7, but no confirmation has yet been made regarding the latter.

Some reports have pegged the release of all three versions of the packages as Winter 2007 but according to Lombardi, the current schedule is to release them concurrently in the Fall.

A good and dependable video card is one of the most important things to a PC gamer. That's why we (yep, we love PC games too) tend to spend a lot of time just thinking about and comparing different video cards in order to find one that will do great for our purposes but also won't leave us hungry for months after the purchase.

Yep, just like almost everything else in this world, this whole video card issue boils down to money in the end. The question which most of us will always have to ask ourselves is "Which video card would be the best for my budget?" It would be great if we were so rich we wouldn't have to worry about costs and other money stuff, but that's not the case so today we're pointing you towards the November edition of Tom's Hardware's monthly "Best Video Cards" list.

Keep in mind that this list is just a recommendation, and if you think you can stretch your budget a bit just so you can buy a more powerful card than what the list recommends, then you're free to do so. Also, if you're not really in the market for a gaming-centric video card, these cards are more expensive than what you need. We rather doubt you'll actually need to buy an ATI Radeon X1950 XTX with 48 pixel shaders, 16 texture units, and 16 raster operator units to type up a few pages of text.

All the prices quoted here are of new cards, and are based on some of the best U.S. prices from online retailers. In other countries or retail channels, the prices will most likely vary. And since video card prices are always in a state of flux, the actual products may be priced differently from the ranges in the article.

Anyway, without further ado, let's all click on the 'read' button below to check out the full article.