In the highly demanding (and some say shrinking) world of PC gaming, only two graphics powers really count: reigning popular champ Nvidia and AMD’s ATI division. Now it looks like ATI’s Radeon may have got a bit of a lead on its arch-foe.

ATI, once considered a perennial also-ran to Nvidia’s cutting-edge graphics chips, has become the first to crack what it called the 1 Gigahertz barrier on standard air-cooling. Pounding its chest, the company trumpeted on Wednesday the milestone and talked about “amazing gaming experiences” for the likes of Ubisoft’s Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X. and Electronic Arts’ Battleforge.

It would be interesting to see how Nvidia — whose logo still appears more often alongside cutting-edge games such as medieval third-person actioner Assassin’s Creed to blockbuster first-person shooter Crysis — will respond in their never-ending arms race.

Another interesting point some blogsites bring up: gamers routinely “overclock” their cards, or run their graphics processors at a faster than factory-based speed, meaning the 1Ghz barrier was probably broken some time back. AMD touts the new ATI Radeon HD 4890 as “factory-overclocked”.

AMD forgot to say how much it would actually cost, retail.

And it’s no long-term fix for choppy cut-scenes and jittery screen-scrolling either. As PC gamers well know, the GPU or graphics card is fundamental to the gaming experience. Unlike console gamers who rarely fret much about compatibility issues and hardware requirements, Windows gamers have to worry about everything from DirectX 10.1 to which card is optimized for what game. ATI’s supersonic new card merely represents a short-term solution to the ever-increasing demands that today’s games put on hardware.

(Photo: Crysis screenshot provided by Electronic Arts)

    The rise of casual video gaming may have grabbed the headlines over the past couple of years, but the more hardcore end of the market dominated at Europe’s biggest gaming convention in Leipzig last week.
    Apart from new iterations of popular karaoke-style games such as Activision’s Guitar Hero, Electronic Arts‘ RockBand and Sony’s SingStar, which arguably kick-started the trend of easy-to-play casual fare, the world’s biggest games publishers focused on products for their core audience.
    Upcoming release Command and Conquer Red Alert 3 was a case in point. Not only does the game involve sending dozens of types of futuristic military unit across apocalyptic landscapes, but EA was marketing it in part on the basis that one of the
actresses in it, Jenny McCarthy, is a former Playboy playmate of the year.
    Most publishers were playing it safe, focusing on sequels such as a new version of The Sims – the virtual doll’s house franchise which has sold over 100 million copies since launch in 200? — or movie tie-ins such as a game based on new James Bond film Quantum of Solace.
    True innovation was thin on the ground, at least on a whistle-stop tour view of the main publishers’ offerings. Ubisoft demoed a game in the same genre as Command and Conquer which could be fully voice-controlled — apparently a first for consoles — while Sony previewed LittleBigPlanet. This marries the hot theme of user-designed content (think YouTube or MySpace) to an age-old platforming mechanic, the basics of which that would be familiar to anyone who had played Nintendo’s Mario games.
    Cute sack-doll characters jump over flames and on to rising platforms, but the novelty is that most of the game, from the characters’ outfits and personalities to the landscapes over which they clamber can be modified by players and shared online.
    But for two of the other most hotly awaited games of the season, there was no news, albeit for opposite reasons. EA’s Spore, in which players guide a lifeform in the Darwinian struggle from primaeval soup to interplanetary conflict, is due out on Sept. 4 and had already been presented in near-final form at other events, so did not get a spot in EA’s main presentation.
    World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King, the next installment of the online role-playing game that has over 10 million subscribers — was available to play in an early form, but it remained unclear when the final version would be on sale. A spokesman for Activision unit Blizzard could not even confirm it would definitely be out before Christmas.

    * Where do you think gaming is going in the run-up to this year’s holiday season? Were you at the Leipzig Games Convention? Tell us what you think below.

Our video games reporter Kemp Powers went to today’s Ubisoft press conference, which featured the usual array of gun play and sword fighting fans expected from the French video game publisher.

The company, however, saved some of its most enthusiastic chest-bumping for an update on its “Games for Girls” brand strategy.

Tony Key, Ubisoft’s senior vice president of sales and marketing laid out the impressive data; in the first three months of 2008, sales in the division aimed at “tween,” or pre-teen, girls grew 63 percent. Six of the top ten third party titles on the Nintendo DS are games targeted to the tween set.

And the number one third party title on the DS is Ubisoft’s own “Imagine,” a series of games that allows girls to pretend to be animal doctors, fashion designers, chefs and other professions and has sold more than four million units worldwide.

“You definitely cannot call them casual,” Key said of young girl gamers. “They’re playing and buying a lot of games.”

Which is why Ubisoft is expanding its girl games brand by rolling out a new line of “Imagine” titles between now and October that includes “Teacher,” “Interior Designer,” “Movie Star” and “Wedding Designer.”

We’re not sure how many little girls dream of planning other people’s weddings when they grow up, but obviously Ubisoft has done some focus group study and knows better than we would what professions today’s girls find interesting.

Our favorite game of the bunch is “Party Babyz,” in which girls play as babysitters and entertain the little tykes by having them race, dance and have soap bubble contests.

“Ener-G” is the new brand offering that will seek to capitalize on the popularity of girl sports when it releases during the holidays.

Calling it “the first sports brand dedicated to girls,” Key explained that the interest in sports is at an all-time high among young girls, with one in two girls playing sports in 2008 and 50 percent of all high school athletes being female.

For a company that is renown for its games for the hardcore enthusiasts, Ubisoft is definitely proving that it knows what the young ladies like.