Graphics Cards - Page 200

The race for next-gen graphics cards is here, with Micron revealing that the overclocking headroom on GDDR6 is going to be significant, where we will see bandwidth numbers that beat HBM2 and even surpass the memory bandwidth of the NVIDIA Tesla V100.

Micron released a new research paper that should open most peoples eyes to GDDR6, which is what NVIDIA will be using on their next-generation GeForce GTX 11 series graphics cards. Inside of the paper, Micron talks about the silicon changes, channel enhancements, and performance measurements of GDDR6.

GDDR6 will offer some deliciously high bandwidth numbers that make GDDR5/X look like they're from 1999, all while using less power. This means that we can have next-gen graphics cards that offer a true leap in memory bandwidth, all while the GDDR6 is using less power.

Computex 2018 - We knew it was coming from rumors from late April, but I've just had an industry source reach out to me moments ago here in Taipei that AMD will be launching their refreshed Vega 20 during Computex 2018.

AMD's new Vega 20 will be made on the new 7nm node fixing most of the mistakes and problems of Vega 10, it will come with up to a whopping 32GB of HBM2. If you were expecting a new Radeon RX Vega graphis card for the consumer market and gamers, think again - Vega 20 with 32GB of HBM2 on 7nm will be for the professional/workstation markets.

My source didn't tell me the price but did say it would be 'expensive' and that it would be announced during AMD's own Computex 2018 press conference which kicks off on Wednesday morning.

NVIDIA has teased its "next generation mainstream GPU", something it will detail at the Hot Chips 30 symposium on August 20, without any new details provided. Is this the first real tease of the GeForce GTX 1180?

There's no announcement of which GPU architecture NVIDIA is talking about, but from my sources from a few months ago the next GeForce release will be based on the Turing GPU architecture. NVIDIA has said that Stuart Oberman, VP of ASIC engineering at NVIDIA will present the next-gen mainstream GPU at the event.

We don't have anything else to report at this time, but with a release window of sometime in Q3 2018, we should expect NVIDIA to use GDDR6, which goes into mass production at the same time.

NVIDIA has just released a new set of Game Ready drivers, with the GeForce 397.93 WHQL drivers delivering optimizations for State of Decay 2 and The Crew 2 beta, and more.

The Crew 2 beta test will happen between May 31 and June 4, while the full game is released on June 29, so we get some time with our GeForce graphics cards before the full release in official driver support form. NVIDIA has also added or updated SLI profiles for both DRG Initiative and Star Wars: Battlefront II.

There are a bunch of fixes, which you can read in the full patch notes here. You can grab the new GeForce Game Ready 397.93 WHQL drivers here.

NVIDIA has just announced its new GeForce GTX 1050 3GB which will join the GTX 1050 2GB model and fall under the GTX 1050 Ti with 4GB.

The new GTX 1050 3GB has more CUDA cores than the GTX 1050 2GB with 768 CUDA cores on the new GTX 1050 3GB compared to 640 on the 2GB model. The 3GB of GDDR5 is clocked at the same 7Gbps of the 2GB model, but has had its memory bus cut down to 96-bit, while the GTX 1050 2GB flies higher with a 128-bit memory bus.

With its 96-bit memory bus, we should receive around 84GB/sec of memory bandwidth compared to the 112GB/sec of both the GTX 1050 2GB and GTX 1050 Ti 4GB cards. 1080p or lower gamers with eSports titles shouldn't have a problem with this card, but I think we'll need to do some testing with Fortnite and PUBG on it when it's released.

NVIDIA is preparing their GeForce GTX 1180 for June 15 in Founders Edition form according to the latest rumor from Tom's Hardware, a new card that would beat out their current flagship graphics card, the TITAN Xp.

I exclusively reported that NVIDIA will name the new cards the GeForce GTX 1180 and that it will be the Turing architecture (after all the kerfuffle over Ampere, but that GPU architecture comes after Turing). We can expect the June 15 release to be a hotly-talked about subject, especially as it's the week after Computex which is quite odd indeed.

NVIDIA will push out the GTX 1180 Founders Edition first, then AIB partners like ZOTAC, MSI, ASUS, GIGABYTE and others will have their custom cards to show off sometime in August-September.

NVIDIA's effects from the now-dead GPP are in full play here with MSI announcing their new MECH series of graphics cards, which won't be using the newer Vega GPU architecture but the older Polaris GPU architecture.

MSI's new MECH 2 series cards are split into two SKUs for now: Radeon RX 570 and RX 580. The MSI Radeon RX 580 MECH 2 8G OC is the flagship MECH 2 card in the RX 500 series range, with MSI's own TORX Fan 2.0 providing 22% more air pressure for improved cooling performance and lowered noise.

MSI expects its new RX 580/570 MECH 2 graphics cards to be in stores in July, and I'm sure a detailed unveiling at Computex 2018 which kicks off in a couple of weeks, and samples/reviews that will take place very shortly after.

NVIDIA has had yet another record-setting quarter, with the GPU giant posting their fiscal Q1 2019 results with the company pulling in record revenues of $3.21 billion, representing a huge 66% increase compared to last year.

The company made $1.3 billion in operating profit, which is an even larger increase of 134% over last year, with gross margins pumped by 64.5%. NVIDIA says that the margin growth comes down to "higher value platforms in the GPU segment", meaning more high-end graphics cards were sold, with more profit made on each of them.

NVIDIA saw a huge increase in their GPU sales with $2.77 billion, a 77% increase year-on-year with most of the money being made on the gaming side of things with GeForce GTX 10 series cards. GTX 10 series sales represented $1.7 billion of that $2.77 billion, a 68% increase over last year.

AMD might not be selling many (see none) Radeon RX Vega graphics cards to PC gamers and miners, but they are cutting Vega GPU cores into smaller amounts and sending them to Intel en masse to pump into their 8th-gen Core processors.

The latest product to feature Radeon RX Vega M GH graphics is the new Chuwi HiGame PC which the company is launching on Indiegogo with special pre-order pricing. Chuwi is offering two variants of its HiGame PC, one that rocks the Core i5-8305G processor, 8GB of DDR4 and 128GB of SSD storage for $1299 (or $999 for the special IndieGogo pricing).

The beefier Core i7-8709G model has the same 8GB of DDR4 but bumps the storage to 256GB for $1499 (or $1299 for the Indiegogo special).

Intel might be working on its first foray into GPUs in the last 20 years, but in the meantime they're continuing to dominate the market with their Xeon CPUs with some rather impressive results coming out of Stanford and the Dawn Benchmark and Competition.

The battle was between Intel's Xeon, Google's TPU v2 and NVIDIA's various GPUs including the Tesla V100. ImageNet used to take around 10 days to be trained, but now it can be done in just 31 minutes thanks to the super-powered Google TPU v2, representing an increase of a mind blowing 477x.

But it's not just brute speed as these companies and universties have to spend millions of dollars on hardware, so cost efficiency plays a big part, and that's where Intel kills it. Without using a GPU at all, Intel Xeon Scalable processors were able to process 10,000 images for just $0.02 and a latency of just 9.96ms.

Intel has been working hard on their new GPU with industry sources telling TweakTown that they've reached the end of this first step, and are now preparing for the big launch.

The company has spent the better part of two years on this, and in the last minute poached key talent from AMD with Raja Koduri and Chris Hook. Not only that, but Intel secured Athlon and Ryzen CPU architect Jim Keller who was working at Tesla until last week, and are now pushing full steam ahead with the next generation Intel graphics core.

My sources are telling me to expect something late this year with all attention to be placed on Intel at CES 2019 in January, where Intel could unveil their new GPU. A discrete graphics card launch from Intel would be a huge deal to gamers, as NVIDIA has no competition in the high-end graphics card market from AMD whatsoever.

ASRock only just entered the graphics card market for the first time ever, and now it seems that AMD is blocking them from selling Radeon graphics cards in Europe, because reasons.

Tom's Hardware has the story, with an ASRock sales manager explaining that "The problem is that AMD has not agreed to sell (ASRock graphics cards) in EU, that is really a pity". This isn't a surprise as regional blocks on specific products from certain countries isn't something new, as there truly are a plethora of brands to choose from in Europe.

ASRock recently launched their new Radeon RX 580 Phantom Gaming graphics card, but you won't be buying it in Europe, soz.

NVIDIA turned the entire graphics card and PC gaming community on its head with the push of the GeForce Partner Program, or GPP. But it hasn't even been a few months yet, nor have we seen the fruits of this evil labor, and it's done, dusted, over.

NVIDIA has officially canceled the GPP with a post on their own blog where they said: "The rumors, conjecture and mistruths go far beyond its intent. Rather than battling misinformation, we have decided to cancel the program". NVIDIA continues, adding "GPP had a simple goal - ensuring that gamers know what they are buying and can make a clear choice".

The post continued:

Valve has such a good thing going with its Steam Hardware Survey, as it gives us a great glimpse into how the split between AMD and Intel on the CPU side of things, and AMD and NVIDIA on the GPU side of things, when it comes to PC gamers.

We now have the April 2018 data to look over, so I decided to take a closer look at mainstream graphics cards being used with NVIDIA still sitting at #1 with the GeForce GTX 1060 absolutely dominating the charts. NVIDIA holds the top 14 positions with GeForce GPUs, and then they're met with the Intel HD Graphics 4000 as their only competitor at #15.

AMD's first appearance in the charts is with their Radeon R7 Graphics in position #19, while the Radeon R5 Graphics takes #24, and then the RX 480 slides into a much lower position at #27. What about the new mainstream Radeon RX 580? Yeah well that has only appeared in the Steam Hardware Survey for the first time in March, with just 0.29% of Steam gamers using AMD's mid-range champion.

We know that NVIDIA will be launching their next-gen GeForce GTX 11 series graphics cards in the coming months, but the mobile series arriving soon after would be quite the surprise.

According to a GIGABYTE UK notebook rep that posted on the OverclockersUK forums, NVIDIA has scheduled the mobile GTX 11 series "towards the end of the year". Someone asked if there would be a higher-spec Aero 15X laptop coming out soon, as they didn't want to buy something now if a new product was around the corner.

'Atom80' replied, saying: "the range coming in now will be stable and not having any additional refreshes until the next gen of GPUs is announced. Currently scheduled more towards the end of the year".

It feels like forever since we've had a super crazy fast graphics card released, with the 1-year anniversary of the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti already here, and we're inching towards the 1-year anniversary for the Radeon RX Vega, too.

But what advancements do we have to drive us into the world of 4K 120FPS on a single card? It looks like TSMC might have something upj their sleeve with the Taiwanese manufacturing giant unveiling something new: Wafer-on-Wafer (WoW) technology.

WoW technology stacks layers vertically instead of horizontally, meaning multi-GPU graphics cards could be stacked similar to HBM2 technology.This means that we can have even faster single graphics cards packing dual-stacked GPUs and one lot of VRAM, truly pushing the boundaries of what is possible without worrying about multiple graphics cards.

Intel is preparing for an earlier launch of its discrete graphics card than people know, at least according to my sources, and now we're seeing more proof of that with new GPU drivers.

Intel has launched its first-ever launch day graphics driver in history, something that marks the start of something truly new when the company launches its new GPU. The new driver has improved HDR support, Vulkan 1.1 support, fixes graphics problems in a bunch of games and other general issues.

We should begin to hear more about Intel's next-gen GPU technologies in Arctic Sound and Jupiter Sound, with these new GPU drivers the first step in a new direction for Intel.

AMD will be shrinking Vega down later this year from 14nm to 7nm, with the first real tease happening a few days ago when company CEO Lisa Su said they had the 7nm-based Radeon Instinct accelerator in their labs for testing.

This isn't a Radeon RX Vega refresh for gamers, but a professional graphics card with much more HBM2 on-board. The original Radeon Pro SSG and Radeon Vega Frontier Edition graphics cards both had 16GB of HBM2, but this new 7nm node shrink adds another 16GB of HBM2 for a total of 32GB of HBM2. Impressive.

There are GPU clocks and 3DMark runs but I wouldn't look at much of this without throwing in a grain of salt or 5000. For starters, the HBM2 clocks are at 1250MHz (up from the 1100MHz at maximum overclocks on the RX Vega 64 or 945MHz default HBM2 clocks). This would provide some truly crazy memory bandwidth numbers.

AMD has lost yet another executive to Intel after bleeding out Radeon Technologies Group boss Raja Koduri, and recently ex-Tesla (and former AMD CPU architect) Jim Keller recently joining the ranks of Intel, with Chris Hook marking the third AMD executive to join Intel in almost as many weeks.

Hook was the former Radeon marketing boss and will be leading marketing for visual technologies and dGFX (think graphics cards) at Intel. Hook will become their first graphics card marketer, where he'll form a strategy for Intel to use to fight AMD and NVIDIA in the graphics card market in the coming years.

Intel is forming quite the ex-AMD dream team for its CPU and GPU divisions, with both Raja and Hook quite the duo in the not-so-long-lived RTG team. AMD has been morphing very silently into a semi-custom company, with a bunch of high level executives exiting the company over the last few months, bleeding talent out into Intel, and other companies.

AMD has received one of their more exciting products in their hardware labs for testing, with a refreshed 7nm Vega 20 GPU that is expected to go into the new Radeon Instinct card that will arrive later this year.

Vega 20 on 7nm is nothing but a die shrink, so don't think because we're moving from Vega 10 to Vega 20 that the performance is doubled, or even improved that much. We should expect 5-10% more performance from a Vega 20-based card, with slightly lower power consumption.

We should expect AMD to detail its shift to 7nm on the Radeon graphics card side of things with refreshed Radeon RX cards later this year, with a tease of Navi at SIGGRAPH 2018 if all things continue going to plan for AMD.