Graphics Cards - Page 122

NVIDIA has confirmed that it pulled in $6.7 billion in revenue during its earnings results for Q2 FY2023, with the company explaining the reason: lower sales in GeForce RTX series graphics cards because of a "tough macroeconomic environment".

During the call, NVIDIA's chief financial officer Colette Kress explained that the 33% drop in Gaming revenue for NVIDIA from this time last year, 44% sequentially. Kress explained that the decreases in GeForce GPUs were "primarily attributable to lower sell-in of Gaming products, reflecting reduced channel partner sales due to macroeconomic headwinds".

Translation: the neutron bomb that went off in the GPU crypto mining boom -- and the massive drops in cryptocurrency pricing, and power costs and power concerns in multiple countries in the future -- and the massive prices of GPUs in the last 12-18 months haven't helped, oh and the now back-to-Earth pricing of GPUs isn't enough to spur huge sales of our previously confident sales of GeForce GPUs.

Alright... and so we begin. NVIDIA has just teased their next-gen Ada Lovelace GPU architecture, with CEO Jensen Huang saying during NVIDIA's recent Q2 FY2023 results that their "new next-generation coming".

NVIDIA had to say something to help start the hype train, considering their Q2 results weren't good at all... gaming revenues plummeted 33% annually. Jensen addressed this, saying that NVIDIA is off the highs and that the macro condition turned "sharply worse".

Jensen said that NVIDIA is planning to reduce the sell-in over the next few quarters, which will help get rid of the GeForce RTX 30 series graphics cards in the channel. Jensen highlighted that NVIDIA's current-gen Ampere GPU is the most popular GPU that the company has ever made, sitting in the top most 15 popular gaming GPUs on Steam "and it remains the best GPUs in the world, and it will be very successful for some time" he added.

Intel has unveiled its new Data Center GPU Flex Series GPUs, which were previously codenamed "Arctic Sound-M" with the introduction of the Flex Series 170 and Flex Series 140.

It seems that Intel is stripping itself of the Arc GPU naming with the rebranding of Arctic Sound-M, flexing into a new brand name: Flex Series. The consumer Arc GPU side isn't doing so well, with rumors that the entire division is in trouble and analysts saying Intel should package up the GPU business and sell it off... now a rebranding of the workstation Arc cards to Flex.

Intel says that its new GPU is built to handle the various workloads that users will have, without compromising on performance or quality. The company adds that the new Flex GPU series help lower and optimize the "total cost of ownership for diverse cloud workloads like media delivery, cloud gaming, AI, metaverse, and other emerging visual cloud use cases".

It looks like NVIDIA's next-gen GeForce RTX 4090 graphics card has entered production, with leaked OEM documents teasing the GeForce RTX 4090 with 24GB of VRAM is in production.

A post on the Baidu forums spotted by "harukaze5719" on Twitter, teases that the AD102 GPU + 24GB memory graphics card aka the RTX 4090 on this paperwork. We don't know which AIB partner is getting their custom GeForce RTX 4090 graphics card made, as those bits are obviously blurred out. We do know that production kicked off on August 16.

The listing shows the RTX 4090 with the AD102 GPU and 24GB VRAM, there's 3 DP + 1 x HDMI display output: which is the regular display output on graphics cards. Here's hoping those DP connections are the ultra-fast new DisplayPort 2.0 standard.

Birentech has rolled out some new details on its new Biren BR100 GPU, with the Chinese company revealing more on its powerful new GPU at Hot Chips 34.

The new Birentech BR100 GPU uses an in-house GPU architecture, baked onto the 7nm process node and packing 77 billion transistors in total. Quite the hefty monolithic GPU from Birentech, competing directly against AMD and NVIDIA.

The BR100 GPU inside is fabricated on TSMC's 2.5D CoWoW design with 300MB of on-chip cache, with 64GB of HBM2e memory with 2.3TB/sec of memory bandwidth on the PCIe 5.0 x16 (CXL interconnect protocol). Birentech is using two chiplets on its BR100 GPU, with each of the GPU chiplets packing 16 SPCs (Streaming Processing Clusters). BR100 has a 550W TDP, and comes in an OAM module.

NVIDIA's next-gen GeForce RTX 4080 graphics card has some fresh new specs, with leaker "kopite7kimi" providing some updates on the second-fastest Ada Lovelace GPU.

The new GeForce RTX 4080 graphics card was first rumored with a rather large 420W, but the last purported power consumption on the RTX 4080 was scaled down to 320W. But now, kopite7kimi is saying that the GeForce RTX 4080 will have total card power of 340W, but more interestingly: 16GB GDDR6X at a now faster 23Gbps bandwidth.

NVIDIA's current-gen Ampere-based GeForce RTX 3080 has 10GB of GDDR6X, which isn't enough in its class against AMD's fastest Radeon RX 6900 XT (at the time) with 16GB GDDR6, and the replacement of the RX 6900 XT in the Radeon RX 6950 XT continued with 16GB GDDR6X. NVIDIA's faster GeForce RTX 3080 Ti only has 12GB of GDDR6X, while the real dominance happens with the GeForce RTX 3090 and GeForce RTX 3090 Ti both with 24GB of GDDR6X memory.

NVIDIA has detailed its next-gen Hopper H100 GPU at the Hot Chips 34 event, with the new Hopper H100 GPU being made on TSMC's fresh 4nm process node.

TSMC's new 4N process node was optimized and designed exclusively for NVIDIA and its new Hopper H100 GPU, where NVIDIA flexes its silicon muscle with its 4th Gen Tensor Core architecture, the world's first use of HBM3 memory, and so much more.

The new NVIDIA Hopper H100 GPU is an absolute behemoth: made on TSMC's new 4N process node exclusively for NVIDIA, with 80 billion transistors, and the world's first use of HBM3 memory technology. NVIDIA has built the Hopper H100 onto the PG520 PCB board, which packs 30+ power VRMs and a gigantic integral interposer that uses TSMC's new CoWoS technology: this combines the NVIDIA Hopper H100 GPU with a 6-stack HBM3 design for a very potent mix of GPU + VRAM dominance.

We're seeing some juicy silicon news coming out of the Hot Chips 34 conference, where AMD showed off the GPU block diagram for its upcoming MI250X MCM GPU.

AMD's upcoming MI250X GPU was detailed at Hot Chips 34, where we get the GPU block diagram that gives us all the good stuff in terms of specifications and details. The new MI250X features not 1 but 2 x GPUs for a total of 58 billion transistors, with AMD getting TSMC to make their MI250X GPU on their 6nm process node.

We also have 128GB of HBM2e memory at a huge 3.2TB/sec memory bandwidth, in-package Infinity Fabric with 400GB/sec of bandwidth between the two GPUs. All-in-all, AMD has 10 chips that makes up the MI250X "Aldebaran" GPU, with a mix of GPU dies, and HBM2 memory dies (2 x GPUs, 4 x HBM2e stacks per GPU for 8 x HBM2e stacks total + 2 x GPUs = 10 chips in total).

Intel has detailed a little more performance data on its upcoming Ponte Vecchio GPUs on its upcoming Sapphire Rapids HBM server platform during Hot Chips 34.

The next-gen Intel Ponte Vecchio GPU was detailed during a presentation by Intel Fellow and Chief GPU Compute Architect, Hong Jiang, where the new Ponte Vecchio will arrive in 3 configurations with a single OAM that has up to an x4 Subsystem with Xe Links, in a single or dual-socket Intel Sapphire Rapids platform.

Performance-wise, Intel said a 2-Stack Ponte Vecchio GPU configuration on a single OAM is capable of up to 52 TFLOPs of FP64/FP32 compute, 419 TFLOPs of TF32 (XMX Float 32), 839 TFLOPs of BF16/FP16 and 1678 TFLOPs of INT8 horsepower. Intel said its maximum cache sizes and peak bandwidth for each of them: the Register File size on Intel's new Ponte Vecchio GPU is 64MB with a huge 419TB/sec of memory bandwidth.

Intel's entry-level Arc A380 desktop graphics card has reached the hands of an overclocker, who has pushed it above 3.0GHz, but the overclocker said that the experience and process were far more complicated than it should be.

SkatterBencher secured an Intel Arc A380 graphics card from a Chinese website and has been playing with it ever since: the first problem that he ran into was that the official Arc Control software is the one and only overclocking tool to push the Arc GPUs. But it was so bad that the overclocker had to analyze driver code to see what the click OC percentage slide actually does: that's when he discovered that there is a limit of 2450MHz for the default Voltage-Frequency curve.

Intel has two overclocking modes on its Arc discrete GPUs: offset mode and lock mode. Offset mode increases the maximum frequency with higher voltage, similar to NVIDIA, while the lock mode provides you with the ability to adjust voltage and frequency manually, where you can push up and above the maximum 2450MHz GPU frequency.

Intel's entry-level Arc A380 graphics card is kinda out in the wild, where it's available in China and coming to PCs in the US inside of pre-made systems... but now the Arc A380 has been tested with the gold standard of PC gaming over a decade ago: Crysis.

Yes, the Intel Arc A380 graphics card can run Crysis... and not too badly I might add. We're talking about 1080p 60FPS+ with the "Very High" preset and it even had 4x MSAA enabled. GUNNIR's custom Intel Arc A380 Photon OC graphics card was tested, with a 92W TBP (75W TBP on the reference Arc A380) and higher GPU clocks: 2450MHz (up from 2250MHz on the reference Arc A380).

Crysis was one of the very best-looking games when it was released, and hell... it still is. It looked better than most flagship AAA games on either of the consoles at the time, and for many years after Crysis was released. In the new Intel Arc A380 graphics card benchmarked with Crysis, it's using the DX10 API, 1080p resolution, Very High preset and 4x MSAA enabled for 60FPS+ without an issue.

Slowly but surely the world finds out the mess that the Intel Arc GPU situation is, with enthusiasts and readers of TweakTown and any other tech press (written or video) should know by now... but now Intel is thanking Gamers Nexus for exposing 43 separate issues within the Arc GPU software.

In a new blog post on the official Intel website, Intel's Vice President of the Visual Computing Group, Lisa Pearce, explains some of the recent happenings within the Intel Arc graphics software development department. There's not much new here, but there are some interesting things like saying the reviews of their Arc A380 graphics card by Gamers Nexus (who said it wasn't a review) helped them file 43 issues with their engineering team.

One of the questions that Lisa answers is "Question #3: I've read reviews that say Intel's driver is not ready yet. What's the status?" to which she answers: "We appreciate the feedback we are getting in early reviews of our Arc software stack. And it has been bumpy. We have received frank feedback from press during recent reviews, and we have taken it to heart. For example, we filed 43 issues with our engineering team from a review of the A380 by Gamers Nexus".

Intel has just pushed out its new Arc graphics driver "30.0.101.3268" with some new titles getting Game-On support, a list of games that have been optimized, and a bunch of the usual bugs being squashed.

The new Intel Arc graphics driver "30.0.101.3268" has Game-On support for both Saints Row and Madden NFL 23, on the Intel Arc A-series graphics cards, while there are optimizations for the just-released Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered.

Along with the new Spider-Man Remastered optimizations, Intel's new Arc GPU drivers also fix Shadow of the Tomb Raider from crashing when setting the Ray Traced Shadow Quality to High. Intel notes that a workaround to this is changing it to "Medium" or "Off" instead.

NVIDIA will be detailing its next-gen Hopper GPU architecture at Hot Chips 2022, where NVIDIA engineers will be speaking during four talks across two days at the event.

NVIDIA will have a senior distinguished engineer who will lift a bit more of the veil behind the NVIDIA Hopper H100 GPU, with 14-year veteran Jack Choquette. NVIDIA's new Hopper H100 is the world's first to use the super-fast new HBM3 memory system, which pumps away at 3TB/sec (3000GB/sec).

The virtual Hot Chips event will see the annual gathering of process and system architects, where NVIDIA teases that they will disclose performance numbers and other technical details on another interesting NVIDIA product: their first server CPU, as well as the Hopper GPU, the latest version of the NVSwitch interconnect chip, as well as the NVIDIA Jetson Iron system on module (SoM).

Intel's new Arc Alchemist graphics card is nearly here... nearly... with ASRock's new custom Challenger Arc A380 6GB graphics card now up for pre-order on Newegg.

ASRock's new Challenger Arc A380 6GB graphics card is up for backorder on Newegg, with the company saying that the "ETA date" is the 22nd of August... just a few days from now. The listing for the card does detail that it has the new DisplayPort 2.0 connector, but the older HDMI 2.0b standard (and not HDMI 2.1, which is capable of 4K120).

Inside, the card is based on Intel's full ACM-G11 GPU on the TSMC 6nm process node with 8 Xe-Cores or 1024 ALUs, with a max GPU clock of 2450MHz. 6GB of GDDR6 is here at 15.5Gbps on a 96-bit memory bus that pumps 186GB/sec of memory bandwidth, with a 92W TBP.

The mystery that is Intel's GPU marketing plan continues, where it seems that the company is playing around with the desktop Arc A580 graphics card with the first benchmark showing up.

Intel's upcoming Arc A580 graphics card sits right in the middle of the Arc A380 and Arc A770 graphics cards, where it uses the Intel ACM-G10 GPU with 16 Xe Cores (2048 FP32 cores) versus the Arc A380 with the ACM-G11 GPU and 8 Xe Cores (1024 FP32 cores) and the flagship Arc A770 with the ACM-G10 and its 32 Xe Cores (4096 FP32 cores).

As for the benchmark run, the Intel Arc A580 desktop graphics card was run with an Intel engineering sample CPU that rocks 16 cores, meaning it could be the new 13th Gen Core "Raptor Lake" CPU, or something else entirely. I'm sure it would be a new Raptor Lake CPU + Arc A580 graphics card and ran Ashes of the Singularity (in the Vulkan API, not DirectX 12) at 1080p on the Minimum graphics preset: 9300 points and 95FPS average.

We heard more details on AMD's upcoming RDNA 3-based Navi 3X GPUs last week: including the Navi 31, Navi 32, and Navi 33 GPUs, and a month ago we saw some fan-made renders... but now we have some updated renders, with the very latest rumored specs on the new Navi 3X GPUs.

The new renders are from Twitter user "Wild_C" who made some new renders of the Navi 31, Navi 32, and Navi 33 GPUs after his original renders a few weeks ago. The updated die sizes are interesting to note, while some more details on the GPUs themselves (GPU specs + memory + memory bus) are provided by 3DCenter.org.

AMD's new Navi 31 GPU is looking dapper in the render, with a die size of 533 mm², that's including 308 mm² GCD (Graphics Die) and six 37.5 mm² MCDs (Memory Dies). This is up from the previous specs, where it was estimated that Navi 31 would have a die size of 633mm². Some of these specs are "pure speculation" just to note, so don't get your hopes up too much... still, it's exciting to see.

NVIDIA is reportedly resuming production of its GeForce RTX 3080 12GB SKU, after production stopped some two months ago now.

The company released the newer GeForce RTX 3080 12GB graphics card earlier this year in January, an upgraded version over the GeForce RTX 3080 10GB graphics card. The biggest two differences between the GeForce RTX 3080 10GB and GeForce RTX 3080 12GB is that firstly, the obvious difference in 12GB of GDDR6X memory over 10GB of GDDR6X memory. Secondly, the RTX 3080 12GB is an LHR "Lite Hash Rate" model, while the GeForce RTX 3080 10GB has full-speed crypto mining performance.

But now, NVIDIA faces warehouses of current-gen Ampere-based GeForce RTX 30 series graphics cards, in the months leading up to its next-gen Ada Lovelace-powered GeForce RTX 40 series graphics cards. This is why we're hearing that NVIDIA will reportedly launch the flagship GeForce RTX 4090 graphics card first, and the GeForce RTX 4080 and GeForce RTX 4080 later... because there are too many higher-end GeForce RTX 30 series graphics cards left over in warehouses, and now more GeForce RTX 3080 12GB graphics cards are being made.

Intel has officially dropped native DirectX 9 hardware support for its integrated Xe GPUs on its 12th Gen Core "Alder Lake" CPUs, as well as its upcoming Arc A-series desktop GPUs.

In its place, Intel will be using a DX9 to DX12 emulator called "D3D9On12" from Microsoft, where it will send 3D DirectX 9 graphics commands to the D3D9On12 layer, instead of directly to the D3D9 graphics driver. As soon as the D3D9On12 layer gets the command from the D3D9 API, it will convert all of the commands into D3D12 API calls.

D3D9On12 is pretty much a GPU driver on its own, instead of a GPU driver with DX9 support from Intel. Microsoft says that the performance out of its DX9 to DX12 emulator should be nearly, if not as good as native DX9 hardware support. I don't see how native DX9 hardware support inside of Intel Xe and Arc GPUs isn't here, but DX9-based games should be able to run even on the mid-range first-gen Arc A-series GPUs.

Intel had its Arc A770 discrete graphics card at SIGGRAPH 2022 recently, with the company running its Arc A770 graphics card in Blender Cycles with ray tracing.

Intel's Director of Graphics Community Engagement, Bob Duffy, tweeted out that he was running Blender Cycles with ray tracing and live denoising running on an Intel Arc A770 graphics card, inside of an Intel NUC 11 Extreme PC. CPU-wise, it is powered by an Intel 11th Gen Core CPU.

As for the Intel Arc A770: we have the full ACM-G10 GPU with 32 Xe-Cores and 16GB of GDDR6 memory. Interesting to note, given SIGGRAPH is a professional event and not for gamers, but the gaming-focused Intel Arc A770 graphics card was used... and not the recently announced Intel Arc A50 and Arc A40 workstation cards.