Graphics Cards - Page 201

NVIDIA has just released their latest GeForce 397.31 drivers, with the new release GameReady for both BattleTech and Frostpunk, while enabling RTX support for Volta GPUs, full support for Vulkan 1.1, and more. You can get the new GeForce 397.31 WHQL drivers right here.

NVIDIA's new GeForce 397.31 WHQL drivers are the first to remove support for Fermi GPUs and 32-bit operating systems, but has full Game Ready support for Kepler, Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta-based graphics cards.

As for the two new games, BattleTech is from Harebrained Schemes, the studio that revived the Shadowrun franchise with several excellent RPGs, has now turned their hand to turn-based strategy with the release of BattleTech. Based on FASA's boardgame of old, BattleTech puts you in control of MechWarriors and their BattleMechs in an expansive campaign that requires you to outfit and upgrade your team of mercenaries before battling in strategic missions. Think X-COM, with big stompy mechs.

We knew it was coming, but the date was always a mystery... but now DigiTimes is reporting that Taiwan-based AIB partners of NVIDIA and AMD are expecting that the cryptocurrency mining demand will deflate, driving down demand for GeForce and Radeon graphics cards.

Why? Well, Bitmain is releasing their Ethereum ASIC miner which kicks GPU mining's ass... with the Antminer E3 coming soon. DigiTimes reports that "Quite a few mining farm operators have even stopped purchasing graphic cards, as they are awaiting the rollout of Ethereum mining machines by China's Bitmain in the third quarter of 2018. They anticipate mining rewards to pick up gradually in the third quarter, as Bitcoin and Ethereum values may rebound following sharp declines seen in early 2018, the sources indicated".

This doesn't mean that NVIDIA and AMD are dropping the prices of their GPUs, it means that retailers won't be able to siphon as much profits from their cards in this mining boom that is deflating. Bitmain is handling that almost single handedly with their Ethereum ASIC miners impending release.

EK Water Blocks has just launched a new RGB version of its custom waterblock for EVGA's GeForce GTX 1080 Ti FTW3 graphics card.

EKWB has put its usual high-class engineering into the RGB waterblock for the EVGA GTX 1080 Ti FTW3 card, with the waterblock itself directly cooling the GPU, VRAM, and VRMs.

The company uses a central inlet split-flow cooling engine on the EK-FC1080 GTX Ti FTW3 RGB, something that offers best-in-class cooling performance when mixed with reversed water flow, that doesn't negatively impact cooling performance. The design allows the EK-FC1080 GTX Ti FTW3 RGB to be used in systems with not-so-great water pumps due to its impressive hydraulic performance.

I've been on holiday for the past week and didn't cover the purported specs on the GeForce GTX 1180 from WCCFTech, something I wanted to have the time to properly sit down and think about and then, write about... so here we go.

The site says "latest leaks, rumors and information provided" to them, without any names or proof, so this is all in the air. The site says the GeForce GTX 1180 will pack the unannounced Turing GPU architecture with the GT104 variant powering the GTX 1180, at up to 400mm2.

NVIDIA will pack an insane 3584 CUDA cores into the purported GeForce GTX 1180, with 8-16GB GDDR6 models on a 256-bit memory bus with the GDDR6 clocked at 16Gbps, blowing GDDR5X and HBM2 out of the water. This will provide the purported GTX 1180 with 512GB/sec of memory bandwidth up from the 320GB/sec offered on the GTX 1080 with its 8GB of GDDR5X at 10Gbps.

AMD is fighting the good fight with gamers with a new surprise bundle that is called Combat Crate. What is the new Combat Crate exactly? Well, there are two different Combat Crates so far, the first with a Ryzen 5 1600 and the other with a Ryzen 7 1700.

Both of the Combat Crates come with an MSI B350 Tomahawk motherboard and MSI RX 580 Armor OC graphics card. This is a perfect combo for playing games at 1080p or even 1440p, and packing some hefty CPU power for a bundled price of just $599.

If you purchased these parts separately, it would cost $585 cheaper than the Combat Crate. But, the MSI RX 580 Armor OC graphics card is discounted from its original $379.99 price to $327.67, so if it was not discounted the bundle would be $35 cheaper or so.

Intel has announced new plans that would see the integrated GPUs on their processors used to scan for malware and viruses, something that will improve both performance and battery life on some PCs.

Rick Echevarria, Intel's platform security division VP explains: "With Accelerated Memory Scanning, the scanning is handled by Intel's integrated graphics processor, enabling more scanning, while reducing the impact on performance and power consumption. Early benchmarking on Intel test systems show CPU utilization dropped from 20 percent to as little as 2 percent".

Intel's new Threat Detection Technology is available on Intel's 6th/7th/8th gen processors, where it will move virus scanning abilities to the GPU, offloading it from the CPU. Right now virus scanners use the CPU to detect memory-based attacks, but entire system performance drops because of this. The company is hoping that offloading virus scanning to the integrated GPU that performance and power consumption will improve, as most PCs aren't using on-board GPUs to their full potential at all times. Might as well make use of that unused GPU power.

NVIDIA could most likely feel the voodoo doll that AMD has of them being poked and prodded overnight, with AMD coming out with a body slam against the GeForce Partner Program, or GPP.

For those who don't know the GPP is a new program that will see AMD add-in board partners who make both GeForce and Radeon graphics card need to have a very fine line between Radeon and GeForce. For the last few years we've seen AIB partners market GeForce and Radeon graphics cards in the same brands like ROG by ASUS, but now that the cat is out of the bag with AREZ, things are going to heat up.

Funnily enough, Scott Herkelman used to work for NVIDIA but is now the Corporate VP & GM of Radeon Gaming at AMD posted on the Radeon blog, where he said:

We all knew it was coming with a bunch of rumors flying through the internet, but now it has been 100% confirmed: ASUS has given up their ROG brand for Radeon graphics cards by introducing their new AREZ brand.

AREZ is derived by Ares, the Greek god of War, with ASUS explaining in their press release: "AREZ-branded graphics cards are built using industry-leading automated manufacturing to provide AMD gamers and enthusiasts with superior cooling technology and a robust software ecosystem".

This pretty much confirms that ASUS has dropped the Republic of Gamers brand from Radeon graphics cards, which will be reserved for NVIDIA's GeForce GTX line of products. ASUS is expected to sell multiple different cards in the AREZ brand that include Expedition, Phoenix, Strix (non-ROG), and Dual.

TweakTown has been the first with most of the next-gen Navi GPU architecture news, where a few months ago now I wrote that sources of mine had said that Vega was such a "disaster" that the RTG team "don't know where they're going forward" and that Navi will be "just as bad" as Vega.

Well, now Chris Hook has left the company along with Raja Koduri - both from the Radeon team in architecture and marketing, respectively. On top of that, we have fresh rumors from Fudzilla that AMD's next-gen Navi GPU will offer GTX 1080 / Radeon RX Vega 64 performance and that it will replace the RX 580 as a mainstream gaming card in 2019.

None of this is new, as I reported about this months ago but the rumors are fresh again and most tech media is picking it up so I thought I would cover it and give it a bit of an injection of reality.

AMD is losing key staff left, right and center, but one of the best guys in the industry is now gone from Team Red: Chris Hook. Hook joins major talent like Raja Koduri that have abandoned the what seems to be sinking ship that is Radeon.

Hook took to his Facebook page to announce the news, but had briefed some of the press before hand. I have been in contact with Chris for years now, he is a good friend of mine and it is sad to see him depart AMD, but I believe he will be landing on his feet very soon with some exciting news to share.

On his FB post, Hook said:

TweakTown was the world exclusive with news that AMD was preparing a rebranded Radeon RX 500X series, and here we are: a full confirmation that AMD has simply rebranded the RX 500 series, with the 'new' RX 500X series.

AMD is simply rebranding their entire lineup of Polaris-based RX 500 series cards, the same cards that they released last year that were tweaked RX 400 offerings. The RX 500X series the same RX 500 series cards that AMD will now be giving to system builders, OEMs, and mobile platforms. AMD is simply refreshing the brand for OEMs and notebooks.

The deal here with the rebranded Radeon RX 500X series is that AMD is ensuring that the RX 500X series cards are using the latest hardware and driver revisions for Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition for 2018. It might not be a big deal to gamers because this isn't a new card, but this means a lot to OEMs selling Radeon.

I had an interesting conversation with someone a couple of days ago regarding the future of Intel, AMD, NVIDIA and the future of GPU technology going into the 2020s.

What was confirmed on that phone call was that Intel is serious about entering the gaming graphics card market, something the company confirmed in February. More so since Raja Koduri left AMD to get inside Intel (pun intended), as well as a few other key staff and news coming in the next few months. We're in for a big ride.

My sources have said that Raja is "building a great team", that Intel wants to take big bold risks by thinking big and courageous. Raja and Intel want to drive these people hard and that they're 100% in it, with Raja wanting to bring people in to win with Intel now that he's outside of the downward spiral with AMD and their non-direction-no-action-at-all with Radeon.

AMD is forging ahead with its next-next-gen Zen CPU architecture, with lead Zen architect Mike Clark confirming that AMD is now working on the "Zen 5" CPU microarchitecture.

The news comes directly from a one-year-later video from AMD about their Ryzen CPU, right before the new Ryzen 2000 series processors launch on April 19. AMD hosted a panel with the top brass behind Ryzen, with people from both their CPU engineering and marketing departments.

VideoCardz reports that "manufacturers often skip 4 due to its meaning in Chinese culture. It's an unlucky number because it's homophonous to the word 'death'. Something that AMD surely does not want to be associated with Zen architecture". Interesting.

It looks like ASUS is preparing a new brand of graphics cards, completely separate to their gaming-focused Republic of Gamers (ROG) brand, exclusive for AMD and their Radeon family of cards.

VideoCardz reports that ASUS is preparing a new AREZ brand for Radeon graphics cards, where they might not even be branded as ASUS at all. There will not be an AREZ ROG STRIX graphics card, it would simply be AREZ STRIX, we should also see other sub series including the AREZ branding including Phoenix and Expedition.

It's an interesting move, but if NVIDIA is forging ahead with its GeForce Partner Program, I'm sure one of their biggest AIBs (ASUS) would want to stay in NVIDIA's good graces and continue pumping out GeForce GTX series graphics cards under its strong ROG brand.

An interesting set of data was compiled by WCCFTech today, with the site keeping a "very close eye" on the graphics card market over the last year or so. The site has looked at prices over the last month and noticed a huge drop on Amazon's price of both GeForce and Radeon graphics cards.

It was only back in January that an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti was $1600 and AMD's Radeon RX Vega 64 was $2100, but prices have been coming down slowly through February, and much faster into March with sharp declines between March 27 leading into today.

Starting out on March 5, the price of an XFX Radeon RX Vega 64 was $1400 and has dropped drastically back to down $945 on March 27.

Just over 8 months after announcing the AMD Radeon Pro SSG based on the "Vega" GPU architecture, Adobe has announced native support within Adobe Premiere Pro CC.

As some may recall, the AMD Radeon Pro SSG was the first card on the market to have 2TB of NVMe storage integrated onto the graphics card. This card is specifically targeted to users who have high demand workflows such as high-resolution video, VR, and 360 video stitching. The announcement by Adobe is the first major partnership to be publicly shown by AMD to harness the unique design of the card.

The soon to be shipping version (April 3, 2018) of Adobe Premiere Pro CC allows for high-resolution video production, supporting 4K and 8K footage in popular native camera formats, including ARRI AMIRA, Canon XF and RAW, Panasonic AVC and P2, REDCODE RAW, and Sony XDCAM, XAVC, and RAW. The Adobe Premiere Pro CC and Radeon Pro SSG workflow should reduce the CPU and memory bottlenecks traditionally encountered, which will allow editors to increase their productivity.

ASUS has just unveiled their new Radeon RX 570 Expedition graphics card, and as you might notice this is a mid-range offering and not in the ROG Strix family of products, that could slide into that GPP from NVIDIA.

The new ASUS RX 570 Expedition features a dual-slot cooler, with GPU clocks of up to 1256MHz and its 8GB of GDDR5 sitting at 7Gbps.

ASUS has used a custom-designed unit with aluminum fin-stack cooler with two 8mm thick nickel-plated copper heat pipes that are cooled by a pair of 80mm fans.

This year will be a much quieter one for new graphics card releases, with NVIDIA leading the charge and continuing to dominate with the GTX 11 series that will usher in GDDR6, but what about AMD?

According to industry sources of mine, AMD will be releasing a new Radeon RX 500X series family, which should be around 5-6% faster than the RX 500 series. A new 'X' series makes more sense than a full push into the RX 600 series, as the RX 500X series won't be offering anything new.

AMD will reportedly be releasing the Radeon RX 500X series sometime in June-July, which should be able to counter the lower/mid-range graphics card market once NVIDIA stamps down again on the higher-end GTX 1170/1180 markets.

NVIDIA is expected to launch the GeForce GTX 11 series later this year, with GDDR6 to go into mass production in the coming months, and will be used in future GeForce GTX graphics cards.

According to Gamers Nexus, SK Hynix will be pushing their GDDR6 into mass production in the coming months with a "timeline of July-July for GDDR6 from SK Hynix". But remember that I reported back November 2017 that Samsung was teasing GDDR6 at up to 16Gbps, something that went into production in January 2018.

We should expect NVIDIA to use the fastest GDDR6 that I'm sure will come from Samsung, for their next-gen GTX 1180 graphics cards at up to 18Gbps on offer. SK Hynix has up to 16Gbps of bandwidth with their GDDR6 chips, the same as Samsung from late last year, and this could go into the GTX 1170.

TweakTown was the main source of the news that NVIDIA would unveil a new GeForce GTX graphics card at GTC 2018, but my source was wrong - so I fully admit fault for that. Unfortunately it didn't happen, but that didn't stop us from hearing things from sources while I was there.

That's where we were told that NVIDIA would name their next-gen GPUs with the GTX 11 series family, and not the GTX 20 series like what was previously reported. But the bigger news is that we found out what's coming with NVIDIA's next-gen GPU roadmap and it makes sense.

NVIDIA's next-gen GPU architecture, according to our sources, will be Turing. Turing will be NVIDIA's new GPU architecture that will power the GTX 11 series, while the Ampere GPU architecture will succeed Turing sometime in the future.