News Update – March 19 2009

In light of Windows 7 Beta’s continuing popularity and hopefully immanent release, AMD/ATI’s new Catalyst drivers will support both WDDM 1.0 and WDDM 1.1, automatically installing the correct drivers with every OS from here out. If only nVidia would do the same thing so that I could know whether to install WDDM 1.1 181.71 drivers or WDDM 1.0 182.08.

Finally, in honor of St. Patrick’s Day, some news from the green team. The latest mid-range nVidia card, the GTS 250, is becoming available in many online retailers. The card, officially released 10 days ago, is a more efficient version of the 9800GTX+ and an ATI 4870 competitor. The two cards show similar results in real world benchmarks at 1920×1200 resolution, with the GTS 250 having an edge in price.

THQ is trying to sell it’s studio Big Huge Games. The developer of Rise of Nations may close if it is not sold. THQ is quoted as saying “In addition, THQ informed the staff at its Big Huge Games studio in Timonium, MD, that it plans to close the studio if a sale is not completed in the near future. These actions were unfortunate but were necessitated by the difficult economic environment.”

Dew fuels WoW, surprise surprise… This will last until someone else dies from playing WoW for too long, and they find lots of the Dew fuel in his system.