NVIDIA is dressing up a new version of the GeForce GTX 260 GPU as reported earlier, with a revision that carries 216 shader units (against 192 for the original GTX 260). Chinese website Bear Eyes has pictured the new GPU. Other than the increased shader count, that should provide a significant boost to the shader compute power, other GPU parameters such as clock speeds remain the same. The core features 72 texturing units and 28 ROPs. The core is technically called G200-103-A2 (the older core was G200-100-A2). The card reviewed by Bear Eyes was made by Inno3D, called GeForce GTX 260 Gold. This shows that the GTX 260 brand name is here to stay.

Now that the PhysX engine is a lot closer to every NVIDIA owner, new benchmarks designed to test these physics capabilities are unavoidable. First among many are the developers at oZone3D, releasing their first version of FluidMark, a physics benchmark based on NVIDIA's PhysX engine that measures the physics processing capabilities of CPUs, Ageia cards and OpenGL 2.0 compliant graphics card like NVIDIA GeForce 5/6/7/8/9/GTX200 (and higher), AMD/ATI Radeon 9600+, 1k/2k/3k/4k (and higher) or a S3 Graphics Chrome 400 series with the latest graphics drivers. This benchmark performs a fluid simulation by imitating the renderering of lava. Real physics parameters such as viscosity are used. SPH (Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics) algorithm is enabled to increase the realism of the simulation. To test the FluidMark v1.0.0 please click here.

It is already known that Futuremark is currently working hard on the next version in the popular 3DMark series. Codenamed 3DMark Next, the upcoming version will bring DirectX 10 support, will require Windows Vista and will be released by the end of the year. But the 3DMark story won't be put on pause as Futuremark has one more 3DMark up its sleeve. As stated by Nick Renqvist in a recent blog post, the development of both next generation PC benchmarks is going great and although there is no release date suggested, we might very well see one new 3DMark released this fall and one around mid-2008.

IBM today simultaneously launched what it claims is the fastest processor in the world and an ultra-powerful new computer server that leverages the chip's many breakthroughs in energy conservation and virtualization technology. IBM's new POWER6 chip is a 64 bit, dual-core processor with 790 million transistors running at up to 4.7GHz and 8MB of on chip L2 cache. At 4.7GHz, the dual-core POWER6 processor doubles the speed of the previous generation POWER5 while using nearly the same amount of electricity to run and cool it. This means customers can use the new processor to either increase their performance by 100 percent or cut their power consumption virtually in half. Also announced today is the IBM's new 2- to 16-core server which offers three times the performance per core of the HP Superdome machine. The new server is also the first ever to hold all four major benchmark speed records for business and technical performance.

The Turkish website FX57.net spilled the beans today. They allegedly tested the R600XT and XTX model on a Conroe 2.93Ghz with 2GB DDR2-800 RAM together with an Intel i975x motherboard. They came up with the following results in 3DMark 06:

Radeon HD 2900 XTX: 12k | GeForce 8800GTX: 10.5k
Radeon HD 2900 XT: 10k | GeForce 8800GTS: 9k

The operating system used was Windows Vista. They used the Catalyst 7.1 (8.33) which seems rather strange, other reviewers report about issues with drivers, so newer ones should be more likely to be used for testing/benchmarking. That could mean the results are not that meaningful at all. Either the scores are made up or there's a little bit of headroom for newer drivers. Decide for yourself...