How do you choose between consumer and pro graphics cards? Low cost and high performance are compelling with the lower-end products, but compatability and support are better with the professional versions. Oren Payton explores this in depth

Nvidia announcements are coming thick and fast, and while most of us won't benefit from their new Network GPU Appliance, it does look like an ideal product for medium to large facilities that need to have GPU power available on-tap

Apple are about to release the latest version of Mountain Lion, OSX 10.8.3, which includes support for high end graphics cards from Nvidia and AMD.

We thought it was pretty remarkable when Nvidia announced their new Tegra 4 chipset that will bring 4K capabilities to tablets and phones. And it is. But it's no longer unique. To pretty much everyone's surprise, Qualcomm said yesterday that they too were going to release a 4K video-capable chipset too

GPU acceleration - using a graphics card to do graphics-intensive tasks that the CPU would otherwise have to do - has transformed 3D and compositing on desktop and laptop computers. Here's a short video from Eyon that illustrates this and is a good primer for anyone unfamiliar with the concept. It also explains the difference between Nvidia's GeForce and Quadro cards.

What exactly is GPU computing and what does and doesn't use it?

It's really, really hard to create a GGI human face that's convincing. If you know this, then you also know the reason why so many blockbuster movies (Antz, Bug's life, Cars, WALL•E etc) have been about things and not humans

An Nvidia hardware launch is always a reason to get excited, not least when it is their professional GPUs that are being launched. These cards – the Quadro family, only appear once in every two years or so, so when they do, it tends to present us with a significant jump forward, both in terms of features and performance. RedShark contributor Oren Paynton reports

The Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee is home to the worlds fastest supercomputer nicknamed "Titan", Nvidia created the chips that power Titan and have now released a graphics card using the same chip.

Ray Tracing has always produced the most spectacular results of all CGI techniques. We've all seen those images of chrome balls on chess-boards, with every reflection - even between multiple balls - faithfully rendered. And "rendered" is the important word here, because, until now, real-time ray tracing on anything other than a supercomputer has been impossible.