Several PC tech-type sorts have put the new card through its paces, and have found that it just blows right on by the previous record-holder, Nvidia's GeForce GTX 295.

Course, it had want to. It's got two GPU's on the one card, and will cost you around $600.

I always knew the day would come where my 8800GT felt truly inadequate. I believe that day is today.

Most are games (including Battlefield: Bad Company 2), but as you can see, a few towards the end are just for engines, meaning we can expect future games - whatever they may be from DICE or anyone using the Trinigy engine - to support the new tech.

Battlefield: Bad Company 2 PC to include DirectX 11 support [The Tech Report, via Big Download]

It's a set-top box which you plug into your console, and then connect to your home's wireless network. Once hooked up, that's it; you just stream your console games over wi-fi to your PC, even if you're on a laptop and out of the house.

We have no idea how the thing performs, but do have an idea on price: the box is $200, with a $30 fee for an adapter on top of that if you want to use it with a PS2, Xbox or GameCube (it supports 360 and PS3 via USB right out of the box).

[Spawn Labs]

UPDATE - Spawn Labs were kind enough to send over the following video, taken at the HD-720's unveiling earlier today. The action starts around 1:00 in, and really explains everything you need to know about the thing.

The technology is called "Eyefinity", and allows users to combine several monitors and have the card output to them as though it were a single display. A jumbotron in your office, if you will.

Eyefinity is able to run on a single GPU, and this example pictured combines six 30-inch Dell sets into a single display running at...wait for it...7680 x 3200.

AMD's Eyefinity Graphics Card Drives Six 30-Inch Monitors At Once [Gizmodo]

First off the starting blocks will be ATi's Radeon HD 5800 series of cards (starting with the HD 5850 and 5870), which should be hitting stores as early as next month. Nvidia's first line of DX11 cards - the GT300 range - will follow in December.

Suddenly, my 8800 GT doesn't look so trusty anymore.

Nvidia and AMD readying for DirectX 11 [Digitimes, via Gizmodo]

Released periodically over Valve's online marketplace and gaming service, the immense popularity of Steam means these figures (the results of which are gathered from millions of users across the world) give us the best idea possible of just what makes up the "average" setup for the "average" PC gamer out there.

Here are the July 2009 results. To see them in more detail, hit the link below.

[Steam Hardware]

Those expecting an easy run of things will be...wait, were any of you really expecting an easy run of things? New developers or not, this is a Flashpoint game, only now with fancy graphics. And as you can see in the recommended specs, that'll be asking quite a lot of you, thanks very much.

Minimum requirement
Operating system: Windows XP SP2 or later
GPU: DirectX 9.0c GPU: Shader 3.0 (GeForce 7900 GT / 256 MB VRAM or higher)
Sound Card: DirectX Compatible
1 GB Memory: 1 GB
8 GB Hard disk: 8 GB
CPU: Dual Core CPU 2 x 2.4 GHz
DVD-ROM DVD drive: Dual Layer DVD-ROM

Recommended System
Operating system: Windows XP SP2 or later
GPU: Shader 3.0 (GeForce 8800 GT / 512 MB VRAM or higher), DirectX 9.0c
Sound Card: DirectX Compatible
Memory: 2 GB
Hard disk: 8 GB
CPU: Quad Core CPU
DVD drive: Dual Layer DVD-ROM

Can't think of too many other games on the horizon recommending a quad core system.

[Codemasters, thanks everyone who sent this is in!]

So without further ado, here are the system requirements (along with recommended specs) for the game. Note that we have our own benchmarks for the game: we require at least two zombies on dirtbikes, but recommend at least four.

OS
Windows XP: Required
Windows Vista: Recommended

CPU
Minimum Requirement
Intel PentiumD Processor
AMD Athlon64 X2

Recommended
Intel Core2Quad Processor or better
AMD Phenom X4 or better

RAM
Minimum Requirement
Windows Vista (1GB)
Windows XP (512MB)

Recommended
Windows Vista (2GB or more)
Windows XP (1GB or more)

HDD
8.0GB or more

Monitor
Minimum Requirement
800×600

Recommended
1280×720 or larger

Disc Drive
DVD9 compatible drive

Graphics Card
Minimum Requirement
VRAM (256MB)
DirectX9.0c/Shader 3.0
NVIDIA GeForce 6800 series
ATI Radeon HD 2400 Pro

Recommended
VRAM (512 or more)
NVIDIA GeForce 9800 series or better
ATI Radeon HD 4800 series or better

Sound Card
DirectSound Compatible (DirectX9.0c or higher)

Interface
Required
Mouse & Keyboard

Recommended
Xbox360 Controller for Windows
InternetBroadband Connection

Oh, and if you're wondering, the game's out on September 15.

Fed up with all the Xs and numbers and mindless claims on the back of the box, Gizmodo have a handy little guide up showing you how to find what you're looking for in a crowded, confusing market. Where to look for information, who to trust, that sort of thing.

Useful! I mean, I'm an avid PC gamer and even I struggle to stay on top of the graphics card market. Last I checked, the word eXtreme didn't really mean anything.

Giz Explains: How to Choose the Right Graphics Card [Gizmodo]

Coming in at 21.5 inches, it's a "gaming" monitor in that it's got stuff normal people wouldn't want/need in a display, such as 2x HDMI ports and a whopping 4x USB ports. It's also got an 80,000:1 contrast ratio and can output in 1920x1080, so yeah, it's basically a small HDTV, only without the TV tuner part.

But the most attractive thing about it is that it looks, well, not ugly. Like Alienware awoke 9 years too late to find the 21st century's design tastes to be a place of restraint, and subtlety. I still wouldn't buy it, of course - I prefer the extra real estate on my 24" display to bells and whistles - but in a first for an Alienware product, I won't make fun of it, either.

Alienware OptX AW2210 21.5-Inch Gaming Monitor Goes 1920x1080, Actually Isn't Hideous [Gizmodo]

A report over on VentureBeat says that the debut of this "next gen" tech will be so important to both companies that "it's bound to drive the stock prices of the rivals involved either up or down through the rest of the year".

At the moment, AMD are tipped to have their new hardware on the market first, timed for release alongside Microsoft's new Windows 7. Nvidia, meanwhile, are keeping quiet on the release of their new chips, leading some to speculate that they've fallen behind a little with their design.

Both companies will be making extensive use of 40nm chips on their new cards, and both are expected to have support for DirectX 11 across their range within a year or so.

Graphics chip rivals race to deliver next-generation chips [VentureBeat]

There's a fascinating article over on the NY Times' website about server warehouses, with the author taking a trip to a Microsoft complex in Tukwila, Washington that is "one of the global homes of Microsoft's Xbox Live". While the above picture is from a different, nearby facility (in Quincy), they'd surely be the same all over.

One push and a million angry nerds cry out in terror, then are suddenly silenced.

Course, it'd take more than one shutdown to bring the whole network down - after all, there's a global network of servers running the thing - but it'd surely make a dent in a lot of people's evenings.

Me, I'd have to hit it, if only once. Just so I could say "When the light is green, the trap is clean".

Data Center Overload [NY Times, via Gizmodo]

I mean, don't get me wrong. As a long-time fan of the ol' flight sim, the concept of a $300 setup including a stick, throttle and pedals appeals to my love of all things expensive and pointless. But as a human who knows flight sims have been a niche market for most of this decade? Surely Logitech could have spent their money on something more than 4 people will buy.

The G940 will support most recent flight sims, and goes on sale in September. For, yes, $300 (which gets you the whole kit).

We say "absolute minimum" because there are hardware options for the thing that may prove too tempting to pass up on. Like, in addition to the dual 1GB Nvidia GeForce GTX 280M graphics cards and Intel Core 2 Extreme Quad-Core CPU, you can cram as much as 8GB of DDR3 RAM into its guts. You can also opt to have either a 1TB HDD or 512GB SSD for storage. And you can top all that off with a Blu-Ray drive, which should look rather nice on the machine's 1920x1200 display.

As with most Alienware gear, the unit itself won't look quite as nice, but then, you're paying for brute force here, not aesthetics.

Alienware's 'Allpowerful' m17x Obliterates Crysis With Dual 1GB Nvidia GeForce GTX 280M Graphics Cards [Gizmodo]

Some of you might be too young to remember this, but PC gaming wasn't always a choice between GeForce and Radeon. There was Open GL and Direct3D settings to consider before that, and before that, well. Let's just say when Tie Fighter was re-released on CD-ROM with Super VGA graphics, it blew my mind.

From Voodoo to GeForce: The Awesome History of 3D Graphics [Maximum PC]

Posting on the game's official boards, an Eidos rep/mod has revealed both the game's minimum and recommended specs to be:

Minimum
o CPU: Intel single core 3 Ghz or AMD equivalent
o Memory: XP = 1 GB, Vista = 2GB
o GPU: Shader Model 3 NVidia 6600 or ATI 1300 or higher

Recommended
o CPU: Pentium D 3Ghz or AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ (Dual core)
o Memory: XP = 2GB, Vista = 3GB
o GPU: NVidia 7900 GT or higher

The game will be enhanced for users with multi-core PCs, while it will also - courtesy of its Games for Windows integration - include achievements as well.

Batman: Arkham Asylum PC Requirements Revealed [Shacknews]

Melted inside and out. What a way to go. Less like an Acer Predator, then, more like an Acer Toht.

Acer Predator Desktop Gaming Units Recalled For Minor House Burning Issue [Gizmodo]

The successor to the company's current engine, CryENGINE 2 has been dubbed - wait for it - CryENGINE 3, and settles our questions over what that new logo was for. It also boasts that it's not only ready for the current generation of hardware - including, for the first time, PS3 & 360 - but the next generation as well, boasting of "scalable computation and graphics for all major upcoming platforms".

Sounds neat. Also sounds, knowing Crytek's track record for ridiculously inaccessible graphics settings, entirely plausible.

No pics or demo reels just yet; we'll have to wait until GDC in a couple of weeks for those.

Speaking with Custom PC, representatives from both graphics card manufacturers say that "they're working on GPGPU-accelerated AI in games", and that we could be seeing the first games and hardware to take advantage of this as early as next year.

Nvidia and ATI say they're working right now with developers of both games and middleware on the initiative, with the ultimate goal of taking all AI routines - which spend around 90% of their time performing visibility and path finding queries - off the hands of the CPU, and sticking them in your graphics card instead.

Only problem we can see - and it's a big one - is whether ATI and Nvidia would bother to actually standardise this, or whether we'd end up with two competing solutions that would split the developer community and make the whole thing a royal pain in the ass.

Nvidia and AMD to accelerate gaming AI on GPUs [Custom PC]

Amazing the difference an external power supply makes to the size of things, no?

Gallery: Check Out the HP Firebird 803's Liquid-cooled Innards [Gizmodo]