NVIDIA has given MSI the great ability of making a bunch of awesome custom GeForce RTX graphics cards, but then MSI just upped the ante with its new GeForce RTX 2070 AERO ITX graphics card... the first ITX-based RTX 2070.

The new MSI GeForce RTX 2070 AERO ITX is the first small form factor ITX-based RTX series graphics card, packing everything Turing has to offer except for the inclusion of VirtualLink connectivity for next-gen VR headsets. Connectivity wise MSI still includes 3 x DP1.4 ports and 1 x HDMI 2.0, less than the other RTX series cards, but then this is the one and only ITX style RTX series card.

MSI doesn't overclock the GeForce RTX 2070 AERO ITX, with a single-fan cooler and 175W TDP. It should run quite warm with stock fan speeds, but I'd like to see the cooling on this card when it's under stressful gaming loads, and/or overclocked.

NVIDIA has released a new set of GeForce drivers with the GeForce Game Ready 416.94 WHQL release, which include optimizations for the latest games that have dropped with Battlefield V, Fallout 76, and Hitman 2. You can download the new GeForce Game Ready 416.94 WHQL drivers here.

The new driver should be of importance to GeForce RTX series owners with Microsoft resuming the rollout of its troubled Windows 10 1809 update that was broken from day one. This new update adds in DirectX ray tracing (DXR) abilities, which in turn enables RTX features for Battlefield V for GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, RTX 2080, and RTX 2070 graphics card owners.

NVIDIA notes on the official driver download site: "Game Ready Drivers provide the best possible gaming experience for all major new releases, including Virtual Reality games. Prior to a new title launching, our driver team is working up until the last minute to ensure every performance tweak and bug fix is included for the best gameplay on day-1".

NVIDIA made quite the splash with its Turing GPU architecture a couple of months ago now, unveiling a family of Quadro RTX graphics cards with Turing GPUs as well as a new range of GeForce RTX graphics cards, with both families continuing to grow.

The company has just announced during the annual Autodesk University Conference its new Quadro RTX 4000 graphicws card that will join the ranks of the Quadro RTX 5000, RTX 6000, and flagship RTX 8000. The new Quadro RTX 4000 has quite a few highlights: there's 40% more memory bandwidth than the previous-gen Quadro P4000 card, with 36 RT cores for some real-time ray tracing content.

Inside, the Quadro RTX 4000 features Turing TU106 which has 2304 CUDA cores, 288 Tensor Cores, 36 RT cores, and 7.1 TFLOPs of FP32 performance. NVIDIA using 8GB of GDDR6 on the Quadro RTX 4000, pricing it at $900. The TDP is just 160W, 25W lower than the GeForce RTX 2070 which also packs the TU106 and 8GB GDDR6. This is because the GPU clocks on the Quadro RTX 4000 are lower than the GeForce RTX 2070, saving precious power consumption (and thus, less heat).

NVIDIA might have three graphics cards on the market that handle real-time ray tracing with their GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, RTX 2080, and RTX 2070... but there are no games on the market that support RTX right now. Everyone has asked 'where is AMD in all of this' and we might finally have an answer.

AMD's freshly minted Senior VP of Engineering for Radeon Technologies Group, David Wang, has said that the company will not be using DXR (DirectX ray tracing) until all of its Radeon graphics cards are capable of driving it. Wang told 4Gamer: "For the time being, AMD will definitely respond to Direct Raytracing, for the moment we will focus on promoting the speed-up of offline CG production environments centered on AMD's Radeon ProRender, which is offered free of charge ..... utilization of ray tracing games will not proceed unless we can offer ray tracing in all product ranges from low-end to high-end".

We're still waiting for games to have their RTX abilities turned on for some real-time ray tracing on GeForce RTX graphics cards, but that day hasn't come. We're days away from the official launch of Battlefield V which was one of the shining stars of NVIDIA's GeForce Gaming Celebration event where it unveiled the RTX series cards in Germany in August.

AMD has just announced the world's first 7nm GPU at its Next Horizon event in San Francisco, with the unveiling of the new Radeon Instinct MI60.

The new Radeon Instinct MI60 is built on the 7nm node with 32GB of HBM2 with built-in error detection and correction with ECC.

AMD has an industry leading 1TB/sec of memory bandwidth from the Radeon Instinct MI60, which is a huge deal.

AMD is also the first to hit PCIe 4.0 on the Radeon Instinct MI60, with 64GB/sec of bi-directional CPU-to-GPU bandwidth.

I have been pretty much offline from work for the last two weeks over a death in the family, and haven't been able to function at 100%. So some of the news has passed me by, but there was one story I wanted to cover in more detail and that's the reports of GeForce RTX graphics cards DYING.

There have been posts on NVIDIA's own forum as well as Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, and various other places of GeForce RTX 2080 Ti graphics cards dying within a few weeks. Gamers have experienced crashes, black screens, BSODs, artifacts, you name it. Some of them are outright dying, and it seems to be the RTX 2080 Ti more so than the RTX 2080.

NVIDIA is reportedly handling RMAs for customers by sending them a new card, but then that card has failed and some have had to return the RMA'd card. There are doomsday posts saying it's an "architectural defect" but I think that is way too Alex Jones for me, next thing we'll hear is that NVIDIA's logo is green and we all know what Jones thinks about frogs.

It seems that most of the faulty GeForce RTX 2080 Ti graphics cards are NVIDIA's own Founders Edition models, but there are a few custom cards that have failed and died, too.

NVIDIA silently launched its refreshed GeForce GTX 1060 with GDDR5X memory not too long ago now, and now Palit has become the second AIB partner to unveil a GDDR5X-based GTX 1060.

Palit's new GeForce GTX 1060 GamingPro OC+ graphics card, with its 6GB of GDDR5X clocked at 8.8Gbps, which is 800MHz more than the GDDR5-based GTX 1060, and 200MHz slower than the GTX 1060 with GDDR5 at 9Gbps (there was at least one model like this, but it wasn't super popular).

The GPU itself is slightly overclocked, with 1531/1746MHz for base and boost GPU clocks, respectively. All you'll need is a single 6-pin PCIe power connector for the Palit GeForce GTX 1060 GamingPro OC+ graphics card, but we don't have a price or ETA as of yet.

We know it's coming but AMD hasn't said a word about it... yet. But now HardwareLuxx is teasing the 'new' Radeon RX 590 and the fact that AMD is using the 12nm FinFET process.

The first Radeon RX 480 and refresh in the Radeon RX 580 were both on the 14nm node, while NVIDIA's fleet of GeForce GTX 10 series cards were on 16nm, the new Turing-based GeForce RTX series are on the smaller 12nm node.

AMD's shift onto the 12nm node for their Radeon RX 590 will allow for higher GPU clock speeds, improved power efficiency, and I'm sure a couple of surprises (hopefully).

Apple announced its new MacBook Air and MacBook Pro laptops with the latest refresh of their popular laptop line configurable with AMD Radeon Pro Vega graphics for the MBP and its flagship options.

The company is promising up to 60% additional GPU performance over the previous-gen MacBook Pro using an AMD Radeon Pro 560X in things like video editing, rendering tasks, and more. This is also not the first time Vega has been inside of an Apple product, with the hotly-debated GPU architecture finding its way into the flagship iMac Pro last year.

AMD is providing Vega 20 and Vega 16 designs to Apple for the new MacBook Pro, but if you are in need of more grunt Apple provides the option of using an external GPU on the new laptops. The external GPU solutions support Radeon RX 400/500 series graphics cards, and even up to Radeon RX Vega cards as well as other professional-grade Radeon GPUs.

Apple hasn't provided a price for its new Radeon Pro Vega 20 and Radeon Pro Vega 16-powered MacBook Pros, but we will know that very soon as they will be shipping on November 14.

NVIDIA has utterly controlled the high-end graphics space for a few years now, with AMD getting further and further away from NVIDIA's upper echelon of cards as time went on - especially the TITAN range of cards.

This has increased in strength with the release of the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti in March 2017, and the mess that was the release of the Radeon RX Vega 56/64 cards in August 2017. Since then, NVIDIA released a new TITAN Xp graphics card, and then just a few months ago the new GeForce RTX range of cards that has the flagship GeForce RTX 2080 Ti priced at $1199.

NVIDIA has the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, TITAN Xp, RTX 2070, RTX 2080, and RTX 2080 Ti all ahead of the fastest card AMD has in the Radeon RX Vega 64. AMD has been absent from the high-end graphics card space for quite a while, but in the CPU space they've absolutely dominated against an unstoppable and unlimited resources of Intel. In the graphics card space however, AMD has been absent from the enthusiast cards.