Video Cards & GPUs News - Page 133

Apple unleashed its new M1 Ultra SoC last week, powering the new Mac Studio -- which can cost over $10,000 when configured high enough -- but the GPU inside of the new SoC was meant to beat the GeForce RTX 3090.

Inside of Apple's new Mac Studio is the M1 Ultra SoC with up to 21 TFLOPs of compute power, 128GB of unified memory, and a GPU that Apple marketed as offering performance of flagship GPUs like the RTX 3090 in "industry-standard" benchmarks... spoiler alert: it doesn't.

Diving right into some benchmarks, if we look at something like Shadow of the Tomb Raider... at 1080p the Apple M1 Ultra is doing alright, with 108FPS average. 96FPS average at 1440p is impressive, and 60FPS at 4K isn't bad at all for a tiny little SoC. The RTX 3090 rips it apart though... going against everything Apple said in its marketing. But that shouldn't surprise people at this point.

AMD is about to launch its new Radeon Adrenalin GPU drivers, and with it comes a new teaser video that shows off what the new drivers will include: including Radeon Super Resolution (RSR) technology.

AMD Radeon Super Resolution is the latest spatial upscaling technique based on FidelityFX Super Resolution technology, which was meant to drop in Q1 2022 -- which ends March 31, 2022 -- and will drop inside of the new Radeon Adrenalin GPU drivers tomorrow.

RSR will benefit in a huge way in the fact that game developers don't need to integrate anything in order to have the benefits of RSR, versus FSR needing compliance, meaning that Radeon Super Resolution should work in thousands of games. The loss here? RSR has lower image quality than FSR, as RSR upscale the whole frames (including the UI and menus) and should provide more mixed results over FSR.

We all know that GDDR6X memory temperatures can really get crazy, where the 24GB of ultra-fast GDDR6X memory inside of a GeForce RTX 3090 can even hit 110C... well, what about with some mods to the VRAM chips?

But now those insane 110C memory temperatures have been reduced down to nearly half, with YouTuber 'DandyWorks' modding his ASUS TUF Gaming GeForce RTX 3070 Ti graphics card. He ripped the card apart and replaced the thermal pads with copper pads -- which isn't easy -- and the GDDR6X memory temps dropped from 110C to 64C.

You'll need a few things before you can reduce your GDDR6X memory temperatures inside of your expensive, and probably very hard to get, GeForce RTX 30 series graphics card. You'll need copper shims, non-conductive Kapton tape, and thermal paste with an applicator to get it onto your GDDR6X memory chips. You might also need 400 grit sandpaper, so that you can smooth over those beautiful copper shims.

AMD first announced its DLSS competitor in the form of FSR back in late May 2021, and is now gearing up into debuting its next-gen FSR 2.0 technology.

The company will be detailing its next-gen FSR 2.0 upscaling tech at GDC 2022 (the Game Developers Conference) later this month... but ahead of that, the developer of CapFrameX benchmarking and monitoring software, posting on Twitter saying that he'd seen an FSR 2.0 demo and that there was "impressive performance and image quality".

CapFrameX also said that "AMD even claims that it can be better than native", with "temporal upscaling + optimized AA", it "does not need AI" (so no dedicated Tensor Cores like GeForce RTX GPUs), and it "runs on GPUs from all vendors".

AMD is getting ready to drop its refreshed Radeon RX 6950 XT graphics card, with some 'Super-style' upgrades including faster 18Gbps GDDR6 memory.

But in some fresh rumors, industry insider "Greymon55" has teased that AMD's in-house reference Radeon RX 6950 XT graphics card will feature an all-black cooler. This would be a shift away from the silver + black + red theme of the first wave of Radeon RX 6000 series GPUs -- including the flagship Radeon RX 6900 XT reference graphics card -- so an all-black cooler must mean business.

An all-black cooler reminds me of the earlier TITAN series GPUs from NVIDIA, where the TITAN X dropped almost to this day in 2015. NVIDIA used the GeForce GTX TITAN X as a much more premium-focused GeForce GPU with much more VRAM (12GB at the time) and a serious all-black cooling design.

NVIDIA's next-gen GeForce RTX 4090 is expected to be quite the beast: not just in brute performance, where we've got rumors of double the RTX 3090 performance, and huge 600W power claims.

Now there's some more confirmation -- from the rumor mill, but still this source is pretty solid -- from "kopite7kimi" on Twitter. In a new tweet, he says "someone told me the xx90 with 600W TGP has been confirmed. I think it's too early to talk about it".

600W is a huge amount of power for a single GPU, but with rumors of the Ada Lovelace-powered GeForce RTX 4090 (with the AD102 GPU in particular) we're looking at double the performance of the GA102-powered GeForce RTX 3090. That's an incredible amount of horsepower, and less than double the 300-350W+ that the RTX 3090 consumes.

NVIDIA has a secret stock of flagship GeForce RTX 3090 graphics cards, with the company giving away 8 of them at GTC 2022 (its upcoming GPU Technology Conference) and they'll be signed by CEO Jensen Huang.

Jensen Huang will be signing the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 Founders Edition graphics cards, a pity because the new GeForce RTX 3090 Ti would have launched by then -- RTX 3090 Ti launches on March 29, custom AIB versions as well -- but a signed RTX 3090 is still freaking awesome.

GTC 2022 is all virtual this year, which is unfortunate because it was one of my favorite trade shows to attend pre-pandemic. NVIDIA hasn't been clear on how it will be giving away the GeForce RTX 3090 Founders Edition graphics cards signed by CEO Jensen Huang, but the only requirement for the giveaway is to be a participant of the hybrid (virtual/in-person workshops) GTC conference.

It's pretty hard to find some silicon on this planet right now, next-gen consoles, any generation GPU, some generations of CPUs... but now a man has been busting illegally importing 160 CPUs into China.

Chinese Customs Officials discovered that the "Walking CPU" or "CPU-Man" was trying to illegally import the processors into China, noticing that his walking posture was abnormal, custom officials pulled him to the side. Not only was he busted with 160 processors -- mostly Intel 11th Gen and 12th Gen Core CPUs -- he had 16 foldable smartphones on his person, too.

Chinese Customs Office explains: "[Walking CPU] On March 9, the gate customs seized an entry case of a passenger hiding a central processing unit (CPU). At about 1 a.m. that day, a man named Zeng entered the country through the customs "no declaration channel" at the travel inspection site of Gongbei Port. Customs officers found that his walking posture was abnormal and stopped him for inspection".

It looks like NVIDIA will not only be unveiling its new GeForce RTX 3090 Ti graphics card, but review NDAs, custom GeForce RTX 3090 Ti cards from AIB partners, and everything in between will be unleashed on March 29, 2022.

The new information is coming from VideoCardz, which reports that "product reviews, including custom models, will also be published" on March 29. NVIDIA has reportedly shared the embargo information for the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti with its board partners, as well as final dates for submission of the press release (so that NVIDIA can green light it) and the review seeding list (to people like me).

NVIDIA's new flagship GeForce RTX 3090 Ti graphics card will be unveiled on March 29 at 6AM PST.

NVIDIA's new GeForce RTX 40 series GPUs have been detailed in great length over the last couple of months, but so too have AMD's next-gen Radeon RX 7000 series GPUs.

We now have some more information from Tom @ Moore's Law is Dead with his sources providing some new details, and pieces of the Navi 31, Navi 32, and Navi 33-based Radeon RX 7000 series graphics cards will form into. The flagship Radeon RX 7970 XT graphics card is teased here, with the Navi 31 GPU and up to 32GB of GDDR6 memory.

AMD's next-gen Radeon RX 7970 XT graphics card would tote its 32GB of GDDR6 memory on a 256-bit memory bus, and have a TDP of between 375-450W. As for the Navi 31, it is an MCM (multi-chip module) GPU and packs up to a ridiculous 15360 FP32 shading units (Navi 21 GPU inside of the RX 6900 XT has 5120 shading units).