Graphics Cards - Page 183

Apple's new Mac Pro might cost over $50,000 and even has optional $400 wheels and hell, even the ProDisplay XDR can only be cleaned by a special-made Apple cleaning cloth -- it is a rendering beast.

In a new test with Apple's freshly-baked Mac Pro, it can handle 16K video playback using the new Afteburner add-in card. Jonathan Morrison used his new Apple Mac Pro and the $2000 additional Afterburner card, throwing 4 x 4.5K ProRes RAW videos into a single timeline without a problem.

The four separate 4.5K video streams combine into an effective 16K video, whcih boasts a huge resolution of 15360 x 8640. This is 16x the pixels of 4K. Morrison created 9 separate 4.5K ProRes RAW video streams in separate windows, something that shows just what an add-in card built for content creators can really do. But Apple, about those $400 wheels for the Mac Pro...

Intel has been going through all sorts of issues over the last couple of years, with its troubled modem division selling to Apple for $1 billion, the constant world of hurt AMD is hitting them with in the consumer/HEDT/server CPU markets, and now it seems their discrete GPU is in trouble.

A fresh new rumor has floated online saying that Intel's upcoming DG1 is in trouble, cementing in some of the whispers I've been hearing from my own industry sources. A new post on Reddit suggests that "DG1 is not shaping up very well at all", and that the thermals and power is "looking to be dismal as Koduri is having a hard time reigning in DG1's power envelope. Anyone that has followed his GPU designs know that this has been his downfall forever".

A new graphics card with a 25W TDP isn't going to get anywhere near even the lowest-end Radeon or GeForce graphics card from competitors to Intel in AMD and NVIDIA, and if DG1 is this bad at this long away from release -- Koduri won't look good at all. He was the man behind the failed launch of Radeon RX Vega under AMD and Radeon Technologies Group at the time, with the Reddit post continuing: "The real question now is should we expect to see Koduri still be working for Intel after Q3'20? If not, you can expect to never see DG2 make its way to a retail product".

NVIDIA has released a new set of GeForce drivers which are ready for 2 big game releases on the PC in the coming week, with the new GeForce 441.66 drivers now available.

The new GeForce 441.66 drivers are Game Ready for both MechWarrior 5 and the upcoming PC release of Detroit: Become Human on December 12 from developer Quantic Dream. Not only that, but we have a new Studio version of the drivers which accompany both Autodesk Arnold 6 and Autodesk Maya 2020.

NVIDIA makes note of the RTX enhancements in the new Studio driver for both Arnold and Maya 2020 -- while Unreal Engine 4.24 also gets some new driver love. A few bugs were squashed in the new GeForce 441.66 drivers that includes some magic dust sprinkled on Forza Motorsport 7 and Fallout 76, and more.

Apple has officially released its new Mac Pro into the wild, a new PC that when configured with the best internals you can buy will set you back over $53,000 -- but at the same time AMD has announced the new Radeon Pro W5700X workstation graphics card.

The new Radeon Pro W5700X is a higher-end version of the Navi 10-based Radeon Pro W5700, except this time it features the full Navi 10 die. This means it rolls out with 2560 shading units, versus the 2304 found in the regular Radeon Pro W5700. It also doubles the VRAM count up to 16GB of GDDR6, versus just 8GB of GDDR6 in the regular Radeon Pro W5700.

AMD's new Radeon Pro W5700X is better specced across the board with 9.5 TFLOPs of single-precision compute performance, versus 8.89 TFLOPs on the regular Radeon Pro W5700. We have 160 texture units versus 144 on the regular W5700, while both cards still maintain 64 ROPs. The Navi 10 GPU is clocked lower on the new Radeon Pro W5700X with 1855MHz boost, down from 1930MHz on the normal W5700.

The next GPU architecture we get from NVIDIA will be Ampere, but we're already hearing about the GPU architecture after that in the form of Hopper.

Hopper will reportedly be an MCM design or multi-chip module -- think of the multi-chip GPU design as the chiplet technology that has allowed AMD to leapfrog Intel in the CPU market... But for next-gen GPUs.

A recent patent unearthed by 'kopite7kimi with NVIDIA choosing Hopper to represent the late Grace Hopper, who was a computer scientist who popularized the idea of machine-independent programming languages. Her work led the world into the creation of COBOL, the high-level programming language.

Intel will have much more to share about its new Xe GPU architecture in 2020, but before then the hype train just spat out a little more steam with Raja Koduri teasing a new high-performance Xe GPU.

Koduri recently said the team designing the high-performance Xe GPU calls it the "faster of all silicon", and said it rubs shoulders with some of the largest silicon ever designed. Koduri recently met with the engineering team based in Bangalore, India -- where he tweeted out the Xe GPU was "the baap of all", which Wccftech's Usman Pirzada says translates to "the father of all".

With Raja referring to this Xe GPU as some of the largest silicon in the world, Pirzada thinks Raja is talking about a GPU with a die size pushing 750-800mm2 -- this would make Intel's new Xe GPU one of the largest GPUs ever designed. With this, we should expect some great performance but we're still a while out from that.

Qualcomm is really pushing desktop-level features with the Snapdragon 865, with unparalelled amounts of power that provides huge performance for unreleased smartphones -- but also some important features lke upgradeable GPU drivers.

The new smartphones coming in 2020 powered by Qualcomm's new Snapdragon 865 will support updateable GPU drivers, with Qualcomm working with Google to have Adreno GPU Driver updates freely available on the Google Play Store.

This small (but very significant) change in Snapdragon 865 with updateable GPU drivers brings mobile users into the world of the PC -- as we've had this for decades. Qualcomm made a point that the GPU updates will come out "well after" the phone itself launches.

I've been told by NVIDIA directly that there will "not be a GeForce RTX 2080 Ti SUPER" graphics card, but that hasn't stopped the team from TecLab from making a Frankenstein-style RTX 2080 Ti SUPER themselves.

The team ripped apart two separate GALAX GeForce RTX 2080 SUPER graphics cards, taking their faster 16Gbps GDDR6 modules and using 11 x 16Gbps modules onto an RTX 2080 Ti. The stock GeForce RTX 2080 Ti has 11GB of GDDR6 at 14Gbps, but the RTX 2080 SUPER ships with faster 16Gbps modules.

NVIDIA, if it were to launch a GeForce RTX 2080 Ti SUPER, would make it much beefier than just increasing GDDR6 bandwidth. We should expect more CUDA cores as well as maybe a wider memory bus, with faster GDDR6 as well.

There have been whispers that some big job losses were coming to Silicon Valley, and in that time I've reached out to some industry sources who have corroborated such things -- but now, it seems it's beginning.

Chris Hook and Heather Lennon, former Radeon Technologies Group marketing staffers, have left Intel. In the last couple of years they both left the crumbling team of RTG where most of them found a new home at Intel, and now Hook and Lennon have left the odyssey. I reached out to both of them and had the news confirmed independently, too.

Given that Intel are really starting to see their wheels wobble in the consumer market with huge market share losses to their consumer and now HEDT processors, AMD is really putting the pressure on them. Intel did a shady trick of having an NDA of their latest 10th-gen HEDT chips just before AMD's new Ryzen Threadripper 3950/3970X launched -- and then within a couple of days this news breaks out.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX and GeForce RTX gamers will want to jump on the latest GeForce Game Ready 441.41 drivers, which include optimizations for Halo: Reach that is about to drop on the PC, and offers optimal support for the new Quake II RTX v1.2 update.

Game Ready for Halo: Reach means that you get the latest performance optimizations, profiles and bug fixes from NVIDIA for the game -- while you get optimal support for the latest version of Quake II RTX, which provides even better quality graphics, water reflections, and ray tracing goodness.

There's also some issues fixed with Red Dead Redemption 2 when SLI is enabled and you're running Vulkan, while both Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Forza Horizon 4 get some tweak love in the new GeForce 441.41 drivers. The big note here is the strange "known issue" about V-Sync which NVIDIA outright says in the new drivers: "V-Sync does not work". Alrighty.

NVIDIA very quietly updated its Tesla range of graphics cards in the last 24 hours, introducing the new Tesla V100s graphics card that packs a faster Volta GPU and quicker HBM2 memory.

The new Tesla V100s (note the small 's', I guess this means 'SUPER' in the Volta sense) is pretty much just as faster version of the original Tesla V100, with the same GV100 GPU on the 12nm node and the same 5120 CUDA cores -- but it's the clock speed and memory bandwidth that are impressive.

NVIDIA's original Tesla V100 has its GV100 GPU boost clock at up to 1367MHz resulting in 14 TFLOPs of compute performance, while the new Tesla V100s has its GV100 GPU at up to 1601MHz boost clock which results in 16.4 TFLOPs of compute performance.

NVIDIA has been pretty quiet when it comes to multi-GPU rigs with their latest Turing-based GeForce RTX and GeForce RTX SUPER graphics cards, but is all of that about to change? Quite possibly.

The creator of SLI Compatibility Bits, a super-useful tool for SLI and NVLink users, recently spotted that NVIDIA silently added Multi-GPU Checkerboard Rendering in their latest GeForce drivers. You'll need to manually enable this feature inside of the NVIDIA Inspector Profile tool by changing some of the settings including SLI compatibility bits (for DX10, DX11, and DX12) as well as the SLI rendering mode options.

Checkerboard rendering isn't something new as it's a method of rendering that's used in some console games, including the PlayStation 4 Pro and its upgraded 4K graphics in some games. But when we're talking multi-GPU configurations the kinda doors that Checkerboard Rendering can open are extensive -- like multi-GPUs working in DX10, DX11, and DX12 titles even if the game itself doesn't directly support it.

NVIDIA told me at E3 2019 during the GeForce RTX SUPER unveiling that there would NOT be a GeForce RTX 2080 Ti SUPER, but according to the latest rumors it appears that the RTX 2080 Ti SUPER is really coming and it'll be a BEAST.

The latest rumors are coming from kopite7kimi on Twitter, who has leaked out other information on the previous RTX SUPER and GTX 16 graphics cards from NVIDIA. The new rumor pegs up some specs on the card with NVIDIA reportedly using the full Turing TU102 GPU with a mean 4608 CUDA cores, 576 tensor cores, 72 RT cores, 288 texture units, and 96 ROPs and even-faster 16Gbps GDDR6 memory.

We should expect NVIDIA to go above and beyond with the amount of GDDR6, with the non-SUPER GeForce RTX 2080 Ti having 11GB of GDDR6 the new purported RTX 2080 Ti could have 11-16GB of GDDR6. I would like to see it with 12GB minimum, but rather 16GB -- it provides a nice buffer between the insane 24GB of GDDR6 on the flagship TITAN RTX.

PowerColor has just unveiled what appears to be the best custom Navi graphics card yet, with the new Radeon RX 5700 XT Liquid Devil coming in with liquid cooling and its Navi GPU clocked at up to 2070MHz -- the fastest clocks on a Navi 10 out of the box yet.

The new PowerColor RX 5700 XT Liquid Devil features an EK Water Blocks made full-cover water block, with PowerColor tweaking it with their own logos and design traits. EK's water block on the Radeon RX 5700 XT Liquid Devil covers the entire PCB which means the Navi 10 GPU is liquid cooled, the 8GB of GDDR6 memory is liquid cooled, and the VRMs and MOSFETs are also cooled by liquid.

EKWB uses a nickel-plated copper base that takes heat away from the 7nm Navi 10 GPU, 8GB of GDDR6 memory and other heat-generating parts of the card. It does all of this while looking great too, with PowerColor throwing in some RGB lighting that isn't too over the top -- and if anything, really makes the card pop.

AMD has announced its first Navi-based workstation graphics card with the new Radeon Pro W5700, featuring the Navi 10 GPU based on the RDNA architecture on 7nm -- the world's first 7nm workstation graphics card.

The new Radeon Pro W5700 packs 36 compute units which translates into 2304 stream processors and 64 ROPs, meaning it's not the full Navi 10 chip used on the flagship Radeon RX 5700 gaming card. We do have the Navi 10 GPU clocked at up to 1930MHz, resulting in total compute power of 8.89 TFLOPs.

AMD has chosen to use 8GB of GDDR6 on the same 256-bit memory bus as the Radeon RX 5700 XT, with the GDDR6 clocked at 14Gbps we have memory bandwidth of up to 448GB/sec. The one thing lacking from the new Navi-based Radeon Pro W5700 workstation graphics card is the use of ECC memory, something that the Vega-based Radeon Pro cards did offer.

AMD is expected to unleash their second-gen Navi GPU at CES 2020 according to the latest reports, with a preview at CES of the second-gen RDNA-based Radeon RX 6700 family -- at least that's what I'll call it for now.

The new second-gen RDNA 2 architecture is expected to use an optimized 7nm+ process node, offer up enthusiast-grade graphics cards (YES!), hardware-level ray tracing support, both GDDR6 and HBM2 options, and even more power efficiency over the first-gen Navi products.

The note about AMD using HBM2 is interesting, which could be useful for the enthusiast-grade RDNA 2 cards that would not just compete with NVIDIA's current flagship GeForce RTX 2080 Ti but also whatever NVIDIA is cooking up for 2020 in their new Ampere-based GeForce RTX 3000 series cards that should see the RTX 3070, RTX 3080, and RTX 3080 Ti released at Computex/E3 2020.

The rest of our PC components and peripherals have RGB lighting, with one of the last pieces of the RGB puzzle being our display connectivity in DisplayPort and HDMI cables with RGB lighting... until now.

Vivify has announced their new HDMI cable with RGB lighting, with two lengths available -- a 9-foot cable for $80 (discounted from $150), or a longer 15-foot cable for $100 (discounted from $200). Vivify's new Arquus W73 (because people are going to call it that) is a 4K "gaming" HDMI RGB cable, with 7 different colors and a cycle mode to boot.

Vivify's new RGB laden HDMI cable isn't just an HDMI cable + RGB lighting -- the company adds that it has used high-quality fiber optics with the new Arquus W73 cable that allows for longer cables over passive copper HDMI cables. Traditional copper cables use electricity to transmit signals, versus fiber optic cables using lasers. Light (and thus, lasers) move much faster than electricity as well, on top of not being affected by electromagnetic interference (EMI) or radio frequency interference (RFI) like traditional copper-based HDMI cables.

We've been hearing more and more about NVIDIA's new Ampere GPU architecture, and now we're seeing an industry analyst come out and say that they expect NVIDIA ot launch a "litany of upcoming 7nm" launches in the "next nine months".

Given the naming system of the current Turing-based GeForce RTX cards, we should expect NVIDIA to call the new Ampere-based GPUs on the 7nm node the GeForce RTX 3000 series. This means we'll see a flagship GeForce RTX 3080 Ti that should utterly destroy the current flagship RTX 2080 Ti, and a new Ampere-powered GeForce RTX 3080 and RTX 3070 fashion as the Turing launch in 2018.

Susquehanna Financial Group analyst Christopher Rolland said on Tuesday: "We think NVIDIA faces the most reasonable Street expectations in quite some time, with potential tailwinds from improving DC [data center], Switch [Nintendo console], and high GPU [graphics processing unit] attach rates (laptops/desktops), all in front of a litany of upcoming 7nm [nanometer] launches over the next nine months".

NVIDIA has just released its new GeForce 441.20 WHQL drivers, which provide Game Ready support for Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order -- as well as an SLI profile for the game which is interesting to see in the tail end of 2019.

Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order isn't the only one to get Game Ready goodness, with "optimal support" also included by NVIDIA for the new VR game Stormland. In addition to Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order and Stormland optimizations, NVIDIA also includes more G-SYNC compatible monitor support with the new GeForce 441.20 drivers.

The new drivers add support for a few more monitors that boosts NVIDIA's collection of G-SYNC compatible displays to 60, with the Acer XB273U, Acer XV273U, and ASUS VG259Q monitors now supported with GeForce 441.20 drivers. You can get NVIDIA's new GeForce 441.20 drivers here.

Crytek teased one of the best-looking tech demos ever with Neon Noir unleashed at the Game Developers Conference 2019 earlier this year, but now you and I can download and run it -- is this the new Crysis?

CRYENGINE 5.7 is the latest build of the engine that the team has injected DirectX 12 and Vulkan API support into, something that is explained and detailed in Crytek's "Making of" the Neon Noir demo in a new CRYENGINE developer diary video.

As for Neon Noir, it is a project for Crytek's hardware and API agnostic ray tracing technologies in CRYENGINE, now in benchmark form. Crytek explains that their mesh-based ray tracing in CRYENGINE 5.7 and Neon Noir uses their SVOGI technology, which will ship in CRYENGINE in 2020. You can download the Neon Noir Ray Tracing Benchmark right here.