Hewlett-Packard has chosen nVidia's RIVA TNT 3D graphics processor as the standard motherboard graphics scheme for HP Pavilion 8580C and 8590C multimedia personal computers, the company announced yesterday. "By selecting the RIVA TNT, with its high performance and complete feature set, HP Pavilion customers can now enjoy all of the latest graphically-intense applications, web sites and entertainment titles," nVidia VP Jeff Fisher gushed. nVidia claims the RIVA TNT 3D processor has been "optimized" for PIII-based PCs, by which they mean that they've added support for the processor's Streaming SIMD Extensions. The TNT offers fast fill rates of up to 180 million pixels-per-second and an enhanced dual 32-bit color 3D pipeline, as well as a full hardware triangle set-up engine, full screen anti-aliasing, anisotropic filtering, 32-bit Z/stencil-buffer, bump mapping, and DVD playback capabilities. nVidia graphics processors are further "optimized" for both Direct3D and OpenGL APIs. We were unable to determine precisely what they mean by that. nVidia was apparently so drunk with success yesterday (OK, so it was a big OEM win) that no one at the company was able to return The Register's call for additional details about the deal with HP, or their amazing TNT gizmo. And we were prepared to be impressed, too. ®