Tech News: Wii U release date and price announced

At a press conference in New York on Thursday, Nintendo’s North American president Reggie Fils-Aime announced that the follow up to the highly popular Wii console, the Wii U, will be available in North America starting Sunday November 18^th.  Almost six years to the date after the release of its predecessor, the Wii U will come in two different pricing variants. The base model, sporting 8GB of internal memory, will be available for $299.99. The “premium” version, bumped up to 32GB and a subscription to Nintendo's Premium Network will run you $349.99. Both versions come with the console, the unique tablet controller GamePad, as well as charging, play and console stands. Nintendo has already committed to releasing 50 games by March2013, but as of right now, Super Mario Brothers U and Nintendo Land are the only games confirmed to be launching alongside the console. More details are sure to come.

Are you excited for the Wii U? Let us know in the comments!

Source: WSJ

How to Improve the Gaming Performance of Your Graphics Card

The overall goal of increasing the performance of a graphics card is to increase the frames per second (fps) at which a game operates. This can be achieved multiple ways. Some suggestions are as follows:

1. Change the video settings in the game.
   Going into the video settings and lowering some of them can greatly increase the fps of the game. Settings to lower include:
   
   • Resolution
   • Texture Quality
   • Bit Depth
   • Shadowing
   • Effects
2. Remove background processes.
   Though the card may be operating at a high level, there may be programs slowing down Windows, which can decrease your fps. To remove background processes:
   
   
   • Check for icons in the Notification Area (by default this is located to the left of the clock in the bottom right corner of the screen). Just right-click on icons for programs not currently in use, and select the Exit or Close option.
3. Update your graphics card drivers.
   The graphics card manufacturer generally has the latest updates.
   

What is CrossFire?

CrossFire, also known as CrossFireX is a platform innovation that allows intelligent scaling graphics performance by combining multiple graphics cards in to a CrossFire specific motherboard. CrossFire only works with ATI based cards that are manufactured for CrossFire use.

CrossFire uses proprietary ATI software and a dedicated logic board in each graphics card to render the on-screen graphics or display using two cards with parallel processing, this can increase performance in games or video editing by a wide margin.

Current CrossFire configurations use a ribbon-like connector attached at the top of each graphics card inside the computer to allow communication and data transfer between the two cards.
To use CrossFireX, you need a CrossFireX certified motherboard and CrossFireX Capable graphics cards. It is also necessary to have a power supply capable of supporting the graphics cards.

Example of CrossFire compatible Video Card by Visiontek

Reference:
Visiontek. http://bit.ly/gCPnsO