Video Cards News - Page 1

AMD has announced that a hacker has stolen some of its graphics IP, and is demanding that the company pay them $100 million for its return.

Back in December 2019, the company says it was contacted by someone who said they had access to "test files" for AMD's current, and future graphics products. A handful of these GPU "test files" were then uploaded to the graphics forum GitHub, but AMD quickly reacted and slapped it with a DCMA takedown notice.

No, the AMD GPU IP leak cannot be used as a source code to build, and deisgn some custom RDNA graphics solution -- don't go expecting that at all. It can't be used to build products, it can't be used to reverse engineer a Radeon GPU design, or anything close to that.

NVIDIA was all systems go for its Ampere GPU architecture (which I exclusively unveiled all the way back in April 2018) unveiling at its own GPU Technology Conference (GTC) last week, but it was canceled over the coronavirus COVID-19 outbreak. This meant the Ampere announcement was also delayed.

But now Bloomberg's Tai Kim has written a new article titled 'NVIDIA's Biggest Pleasant Surprise May Be Yet to Come', where he goes into the fact that NVIDIA is kinda flourishing over the coronavirus outbreak. In positive news about coronavirus, more gamers are at home, and more games are being played right now than pretty much ever before in the history of gaming.

In the article, Tae Kim explained that "while NVIDIA is being rewarded for staying the course even as the coronavirus throws many other companies off track, it's what's not even baked in yet that may cheer investors the most". The bit where he is referring to something being "baked" is the new Ampere GPU architecture in the oven.

Microsoft peeled the wrapping off of its new DirectX 12 Ultimate API today, with AMD actively invovled in the middle of the new DirectX 12 Ultimate API with a new ray tracing video running on RDNA 2 silicon. Check it out:

AMD says it has been working "very closely with Microsoft to help move gaming graphics to a new level of photorealism and smoothness thanks to the four key DirectX 12 Ultimate graphics features -- DirectX Raytracing (DXR), Variable Rate Shading (VRS), Mesh Shaders, and Sampler Feedback".

AMD's new RDNA 2 architecture powers both the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 consoles, as well as the next-gen Radeon graphics cards coming out later this year. There will be hardware-accelerated DXR 1.1 ray tracing support built into the new RDNA 2 architecture, which will allow next-gen console and next-gen Radeon gamers to enjoy some of the best visuals available.

NVIDIA was ramping up to reveal its next-gen Ampere GPU architecture at its GPU Technology Conference (GTC) in a few days time, but in the end the company moved to an all-digital event over the COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak, then outright cancelled it.

But now, NVIDIA has taken to its official blog with a new post titled 'GTC News Can Wait' to explain it is delaying the announcement oif its exciting new products. The company explains: "We have exciting products and news to share with you. But this isn't the right time. We're going to hold off on sharing our GTC news for now".

NVIDIA continued: "That way, our employees, partners, the media and analysts who follow us, and our customers around the world can focus on staying safe and reducing the spread of the virus. We will still stream tons of great content from researchers and developers who have prepared great talks. This is a time to focus on our family, our friends, our community. Our employees are working from home. Many hourly workers will not need to work but they'll all be fully paid. Stay safe everyone. We will get through this together".

NVIDIA's next-generation Ampere GPU architecture should be announced in the coming months, and was meant to be unveiled at its GPU Technology Conference -- which was made all-digital, then canceled altogether.

But now, we have a juicy new rumor on Ampere and some delicious specs to salivate over. NVIDIA is reportedly using TSMC's fresh 7nm node for its HPC (High Performance Computing) products (think Tesla GPUs) while the GA10x GPUs will be made on Samsung's new 10nm node.

KittyCorgi on Twitter has tweeted that there will be 5 different Ampere GPUs on offer, with the GA102 sitting at the top of the heap -- the GA102 will succeed the Turing-based GA102 GPU that powers the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti and TITAN RTX. Following that is the GA103 (which doesn't succeed any Turing GPU), then GA104, and then GA106 and GA107.

NVIDIA has some fresh new GeForce drivers released that are Game Ready for Call of Duty: Warzone, the new battle royale focused game mode that sees up to 150 players battling it out in Call of Duty's usual signature gameplay.

The new GeForce Game Ready 442.59 drivers have day one optimizations not just for Call of Duty: Warzone, but they also fix some issues with NBA 2K20 and others. There are some issues included with these drivers that I'm sure will be ironed out with the next release, but for now you'll want to grab them if you're wanting to jump into Call of Duty: Warzone.

You can grab NVIDIA's new GeForce Game Ready 442.59 WHQL drivers here.

AMD revealed more details about its next-gen RDNA 2 architecture during its recent Financial Analyst Day, where we now (unfortunately) need to call "Big Navi" something else: RDNA 2, or Navi 2X.

The next-gen RDNA 2-based Radeon RX reference graphics cards from AMD have been confirmed to not use blower-style designs, with ex-NVIDIA and now current Vice President and General Manager for Radeon, Scott Herkelman, explaining that "there will be no blower reference fans for gamers on next gen".

AMD will however, not be stopping AIB partners from making blower design coolers on their cards if they so wish -- but AMD has been listening to feedback in a big way. Herkelman added: "Our AIBs may choose to do a "blower" design on any of the next gen GPUs, however, the majority of feedback we received from the community at the launch of 5700 XT on AMD reference designs has guided us towards dual/tri-axial designs. I'm excited for you all to see them when the time is right!"

NVIDIA is in full preparation for its now digital-only GPU Technology Conference (GTC), which kicks off on March 22 -- but between now and then we have some very super-juicy rumored specs on the Ampere GA100 GPU.

There is only a single source for this leak from a Chinese forum, with the folks at Wccftech picking it up and running with it. The Ampere GA100 GPU in question looks like an absolute beast, with this rumor concentrating on the full-fat GA100 GPU with a huge 8192 CUDA cores (at 2GHz which is crazy), 1024 Tensor Cores, 130 RT cores, and a whopping 48GB of HBM2e memory at 1.2GHz.

We're looking at a huge 36 TFLOPs of performance from GA100, with NVIDIA using TSMC's current 7nm+ node, and a huge 300W TDP. This is not a GeForce RTX 3080 Ti or next-gen Ampere-based TITAN RTX, but it would rather be the flagship Tesla card for HPC/servers. We should expect a cut down version of this to arrive in the form of the GA102 -- and power the next-gen GeForce RTX 3080 Ti and hopefully, a monster new TITAN RTX based on Ampere.

AMD has finally talked about its next generation "Big Navi" graphics cards, which from now on in will be called RDNA 2 or "Navi 2X" -- I kinda liked the name Big Navi, though.

During its recent Financial Analyst Day, AMD came out swinging talking about its warpath against its competitors in Intel and NVIDIA -- where it revealed that its next-gen discrete graphics cards will be based on the RDNA 2 architecture.

The company is referring to RDNA 2 as "Navi 2X" which will arrive on the 7nm node, but it also teased RDNA 3 or "Navi 3X" on an "Advanced Node", too. RDNA 3 / Navi 3X should be on the 7nm+ node, or the 5nm node -- something I'm going to need to clarify.

Just as we're all enjoying the weekend, rumors of NVIDIA's next generation Ampere GPU have surfaced -- this time, teasing some basic specifications, purported performance, and more.

We know that NVIDIA's next-gen GPU architecture after Turing will be Ampere, and then Hopper -- with Ampere finding a new home on the 7nm node and offering some truly kick ass performance improvements as well as power efficiency. Pascal and Turing were already quite power efficient GPUs, but Ampere really amps things up... pun intended.

This is where Twitter user '_roggame' comes in, where he has discovered some Geekbench results for "two unknown NVIDIA GPUs". The first of which packs 7552 CUDA (so Ampere) cores, 118 compute units (CUs), GPU clock speeds of 1.11GHz and 24GB of memory. We could be looking at GDDR6 or HBM2/2e, that is not confirmed. The next one has 6912 CUDA cores, 180 compute units, and a GPU clock of 1.01GHz while it packs much more memory at 48GB.