What the Voltage Tweak HD 4890 from ASUS does is let us expand upon our overclocking abilities. For years the only way you could adjust the voltage on the card was by soldering little bits and pieces to your card, which not only is hard for most people but also voids the warranty.

AMD's Gary Silcott told the INQ "they [Nvidia] would intentionally damage performance to make Nvidia GPUs run the same app better." Then, perhaps thinking better of accusing Nvidia of hypothetical, yet outright, sabotage, Silcott added "Even if it wasn't intentional, it would not be optimized for our instruction set architecture like our own SDK."

That's okay though, since Nvidia has no intention of adapting its GPUs for AMDs technology either. "No, I don't see us supporting Steam..." said Nvidia's Derek Perez acidly when we asked him for his response.

Some of the guys up in Toronto sent us an e-mail this morning and explained that DirectX 11 is important and we should take NVIDIA downplaying it with a grain of salt. It seems they are worried that the tried and true NVIDIA marketing machine will possibly start pumping out a lot of information to deflect and sway consumers. This is likly going to be the case as NVIDIA is rumored to be late to the game with DirectX 11 graphics cards and is going to have a rough time to get them released this calendar year. To help avoid this looming marketing battle, AMD has released a whitepaper that has been put together by AMD to showcase the importance of DirectX 11 and why it matters. They also gave us quick breakdown explaining that DX 11 is about efficiency.

Being first would also put AMD ahead of Nvidia, something Daamit has wanted ever since the Goblin pipped it to the post with the DX10 API. "We were kind of fighting from behind, but with DX11 it feels like we're ahead this round," Bergman told us.

The HD 4770 was launched back in April, and just nine vendors have launched RV740 boards. As ATI didn't want to see any non-reference design malarkey, partners launched reference cards, one each for a total of nine.