Video Cards & GPUs News - Page 1

NVIDIA is feeling the squeeze by the US government sanctions aimed at stifling China's progression in the AI race, which the chip manufacturer has responded to by slashing prices to beat the local Chinese competition.

The GPU manufacturer is attempting to make high-end products for the lucrative Chinese market that accounts for approximately 17% to its revenue for fiscal 2024., but it must now work within the strict US restrictions that ban the exportation of powerful chips that will likely be used to train AI models. NVIDIA plans to still release new GPUs in China, but these new models will have to be cutdown versions of new hardware that's limited to a specific performance point.

Reports indicate that NVIDIA found some of its Chinese customers weren't to thrilled about the new performance capped hardware, and would instead opt for domestically manufactured chips that are exponentially growing in presence. Reuters now reports NVIDIA has been forced to slash prices of some of its products to compete with new kits from Chinese technology giant Huawei.

The CEO of AMD, Lisa Su, has taken center stage at imec's ITF World 2024 conference to accept an award and outline AMD's goal of reaching 100x power efficiency by 2027.

Su accepted the prestigious Imec Innovation Award for innovation and industry leadership, joining prominent technology figures such as Bill Gates. Following the award's acceptance, Su began illustrating AMD's quest to achieve 100x performance improvement by 2027 and how AMD is going to overcome big problems such as the compute/energy required to train exponentially growing advanced AI models.

Su explained AI models typically doubled in size every two years, but now its growing at 20x per year, completely outpacing computing and memory advancements. To combat these problems AMD will be implementing a multi-facet strategy that will introduce new silicon architectures, AI-specific architectures, software, system and data tuning, and hardware co-designs.

According to a new report at PC Mag, which the outlet has confirmed with the US Trade Representative (USTR), the Biden administration is set to resume tariffs on PC hardware from the Trump era. These tariffs would place a 25% duty or import tax on goods assembled in China, including graphics cards, motherboards, and PC cases.

There's no word on when the tariffs will resume, nor has there been an official notice with confirmation that they're right around the corner. A spokesperson from the USTR told PC Mag, "We are maintaining tariffs on products currently subject to the action, including the two tariffs you've inquired about." Translation: Yes, the GPU tax is coming back.

What does this mean for those putting together PC rigs for gaming, recreation, or even work at home? Higher prices at a time when the last thing you'd want to see is a notable rise in the cost of buying a new GPU or motherboard. Hardware like graphics cards will fall under the new 25% duty, as China is the primary manufacturing and assembly base for PC hardware.

NVIDIA announced its financial results for the first quarter, and you can probably guess how it went - data center revenue from AI and GPU sales reached record highs, pushing the company's stock price to over $1,000 per share. With everyone all in on AI and NVIDIA leading the charge technology and hardware-wise, you might be wondering how the company's gaming side and GeForce business is going.

Unlike AMD's struggling Radeon and console gaming revenue, NVIDIA's Gaming sector is doing well - with $2.6 billion in revenue, up 18% from a year ago. Granted, it's nowhere near the $22.6 billion in data center revenue or the incredible 427% year-over-year growth seen in that sector - but it's good news for the traditionally quiet quarter for gaming revenue.

Gaming revenue was down 8% from the previous quarter, but the year-over-year growth is being hailed as a win for GeForce hardware. However, as AI continues to rule the day, NVIDIA's financial results cite 'AI gaming technologies' and 'AI performance optimizations' as critical milestones for NVIDIA's gaming business during the last quarter.

AMD Radeon Anti-Lag 2 has been formally announced and is now available in 'technical preview' form in Counter-Strike 2. Like NVIDIA's Reflex latency reduction technology, the new Radeon Anti-Lag 2 requires game integration - unlike Anti-Lag or last year's short-lived Anti-Lag+.

The choice of Counter-Strike 2 to debut Anti-Lag 2 is an excellent move from AMD because of the whole Anti-Lag+ controversy. Here's a quick rundown: Anti-Lag+ was launched as an in-driver solution for latency reduction in September 2023. Fast forward to October 2023, and Counter-Strike 2 players with Anti-Lag+ enabled were banned for cheating. It turns out Anti-Lag+ worked by accessing and even modifying game code and data.

From there, AMD disabled Anti-Lag+ and then removed it entirely. And now, several months later, we've got the new and very different Anti-Lag 2 that requires game integration.

NVIDIA will be rolling out next-gen GDDR7 memory on its next-generation GeForce RTX 50 series GPUs, with the GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition graphics card reportedly featuring 16 GDDR7 memory modules in a denser design.

It seems NVIDIA is changing up the memory layout for its new GeForce RTX 5090 over the current-gen RTX 5090, with the GB202 "Blackwell" GPU inside, next-gen GDDR7 memory on a huge 512-bit memory bus. If that's true, it would explain why NVIDIA would need to use additional GDDR7 memory modules around the GPU.

NVIDIA's new GeForce RTX 5090 will use GDDR7 memory arranged in a denser configuration, with the layout shifting from 3-4-1-4 to 4-5-2-5 (clockwise), which allows the board to support up to 16 memory modules.

NVIDIA's next-generation GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition graphics card is being teased, with a sophisticated PCB design.

In a new post on X, leaker "kopite7kimi" said that the RTX 50 FE graphics cards have 3 separate PCBs: the motherboard, I/O rigid board, and a separate PCIe slot component, that the leaker adds "perhaps it should not be considered as the third PCB".

The Navi 48 and 44 GPUs have been confirmed by AMD - kind of - to be the only chips that'll make up Team Red's next-gen range of graphics cards with its RDNA 4 architecture.

VideoCardz noticed that Kepler flagged up on X (formerly Twitter) that in an update for its ROCm software, AMD specifically mentions Navi 44 and Navi 48 as gfx1200 and gfx1201 respectively.

There are no other chips in the update, so that all but confirms that Team Red is keeping things down to just Navi 44 and 48, as all rumors have pointed to for some time now.

On average NVIDIA has released new GPU architecture every two years, but due to the overwhelming demand for new chips to power AI models the company is accelerating its manufacturing schedule and therefore the time between generations.

NVIDIA recently reported its first-quarter earnings where the company revealed it made an astounding $14 billion in profit from its dedicated AI chips, which have been in extremely high demand since the AI boom. Companies such as Meta, Amazon, Google, and OpenAI want NVIDIA's advanced GPUs to train and power their new artificial intelligence models. NVIDIA plans on meeting this overwhelming demand by increasing the frequency it releases new GPU architecture generations.

Notably, NVIDIA released new architecture approximately every two years, with Ampere releasing in 2020, Hopper in 2022, and Blackwell in 2024 (rumored to release at end of the year). But NVIDIA's CEO Jensen Huang announced, "after Blackwell, there's another chip. We're on a one-year rhythm." Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo reported earlier in the month that NVIDIA was planning on releasing its next-generation GPU architecture codenamed "Rubin" in 2025, which would likely produce an R100 AI GPU that will be released sometime next year.

GALAX recently launched a single-slot GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 16GB GPU that turned a few heads because it was so small and compact for a modern GPU in 2024. Now, the hardware maker and NVIDIA partner are back with a pair of 'Classic' branded compact GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER and RTX 4070 Ti SUPER graphics cards.

Like the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 16GB, these GPUs feature a minimal, almost data center-like all-black design with a single blower fan - a throwback to the GPUs of yesteryear. This is probably why they are being called 'Classic' GPUs.

The dual-slot design makes these stand out, with both variants including the same cooling and physical design. Unlike other blower-fan designs, including GALAX's recent RTX 4060 Ti 16GB model, the heatsink looks to be partially exposed - so it's not a fully enclosed design with all air being pushed through the outtake vents on the rear.