Graphics Cards - Page 208

AMD could be in trouble with RTG boss Raja Koduri going on a sabbatical as of yesterday, but the news of NVIDIA working on a new GeForce GTX 1070 Ti graphics card is even bigger news.

NVIDIA already has a great mid-range borderline high-end card with the current GeForce GTX 1070, but a Ti variant in the GTX 1070 Ti could really rock AMD's world. NVIDIA will reportedly be using 2304 CUDA cores on the new GTX 1070 Ti

As VideoCardz says this could just be a typo as it shows the ASUS GTX 1070 Ti STRIX O8G, but if it's real it could get very thick for AMD, very fast. We will report more as it breaks.

Update: I've since confirmed this with AMD and they will be providing me with a response shortly.

AMD launched their next-gen Vega GPU architecture just a few weeks ago and it has been a sea of controversy ever since, but now we're hearing that Radeon Technologies Group boss Raja Koduri is going on a break until the start of 2018, with AMD CEO Lisa Su stepping into Koduri's shoes for the next few months.

Radeon RX Vega launched in two varieties: Radeon RX Vega 56 and Radeon RX Vega 64, offering GeForce GTX 1070 and GTX 1080 levels of performance. Both cards were meant to represent a return to form for Radeon, especially as the GPU division split off into RTG in the end of 2015.

AMD might have tripped over releasing Radeon RX Vega in its current form, but the upcoming Vega 20 chip should be a monster. According to Digitimes, orders have already been placed for Vega 11 (the cut down version of the current flock of Vega cards), while Vega 20 is right around the corner.

Digitimes reports: "Packaging specialist SPIL, which has already obtained orders for AMD's Vega 10-series chips, will continue to hold the majority of backend orders for the Vega 11 series, the sources noted". Globalfoundries will make AMD's new Vega 11 chips on the 14nm LPP process, while SPIL will take care of the packaging and integration of the GPU and HBM2 dies.

But we're not here for Vega 11 news now, are we? Vega 20 is AMD's next-gen high-end GPU that will be built to handle all tasks between 4K and beyond gaming, AI and supercomputing. The big news here is that AMD will reportedly be tapping TSMC for their new Vega 20 creation, as it will be baked onto TSMC's surely impressive 7nm process.

NVIDIA unleashed its next-gen DGX-1V system earlier this year, promising a Q3 2017 launch, and have followed through with that launch now shipping the first Volta-based DGX-1V systems.

The first Volta-based DGX-1V system was shipped to MGH & BWH Center for Clinical Data Science (CCDS), which is a "Massachusetts-based research group focusing on AI and machine learning applications in healthcare", reports AnandTech. This means CCDS is one of the first research institutes with the new Volta-based AI supercomputer, an upgrade from their Pascal-based DGX Station.

CCDS will be using the AI supercomputers in training deep neural networks that will be evaluating medical images and scans, with AnandTech adding that they'll be "using Massachusetts General Hospital's collection of phenotypic, genetics, and imaging data. In turn, this can assist doctors and medical practitioners in making faster and more accurate diagnoses and treatment plans".

Last night I spent most of the full moon passing over me to test out Ethereum mining performance on AMD's best Radeon RX Vega 64 graphics cards, as well as the hugely expensive and amazingly fast TITAN Xp from NVIDIA.

I've got a detailed article coming soon, but I thought I would share preliminary results of these two cards with you now, before the big article goes live.

I used AMD's Radeon RX Vega 64 Liquid Cooled Edition, overclocking the 8GB of HBM2 from its stock 945MHz to 1100MHz, resulting in mining performance that went through the roof.

GIGABYTE has just revealed their new GeForce GTX 1080 Mini-ITX 8G, the smallest GTX 1080 ever made. It is even smaller than ZOTAC's GeForce GTX 1080 Mini, by nearly 50mm.

GIGABYTE's new GeForce GTX 1080 Mini-ITX 8G is a single-fan graphics card with a triple heat pipe cooling solution, and 5+2 phase card that has Gaming Mode GPU clock speeds of up to 1733MHz, or 1771MHz through OC Mode. The 8GB of GDDR5X memory is clocked at 10Gbps, the same as GTX 1080 Founders Edition. There's still a single 8-pin PCIe power connector to power the card, but no TDP numbers released just yet - although, we should expect 180W.

The super-small GTX 1080 is just 169mm in length (versus 211mm on ZOTAC's GTX 1080 Mini) and 131mm high (ZOTAC's card is shorter at 125mm).

AMD is experiencing at least $100 premium on top of their new Radeon RX Vega range of graphics cards, and now it seems like NVIDIA will be going through the same thing thanks to an industry-wide shortage of GDDR5 supply.

DigiTimes reports that NVIDIA's entire stack of GeForce GTX 10 series cards, so the GTX 1050, GTX 1060, GTX 1070, GTX 1080, and GTX 1080 Ti (and I'm sure the GTX 1060 9Gbps, and GTX 1080 11Gbps, oh and the TITAN Xp) will all experience price increases in the next couple of weeks. The average price increase is expected to be somewhere in the vicinity of 10%, with SK Hynix and Samsung reportedly cutting their GDDR5 supply for the discrete GPU market.

Effective immediately, both SK Hynix and Samsung have reportedly increased GDDR5 memory by 30.8% which isn't going to be fun leading into the holiday season for PC gamers. NVIDIA won't hurt so much from this as they have the financial backing to take the 10% hit per card, but if AMD Radeon cards using GDDR5 go up (Radeon RX 500 series) then they're going to hurt even more.

Total War: Warhammer II gamers will need a fair amount of PC hardware grunt to run at 4K 60FPS+ but Creative Assembly haven't made the game out of reach for everyone. CA have teased that pre-orders for Warhammer II have beaten all previous records in the series.

THe developer recommends an Intel Core 2 Duo @ 3GHz, 4-5GB RAM, 60GB HDD space, and an NVIDIA GeFOrce GTX 460 with 1GB of RAM, an AMD Radeon HD 5770 with 1GB of RAM, or Intel HD 4000 integrated graphics. This is all for 25-35FPS on campaign 1v1, 20x20 units battle, and 'low' quality graphics @ 1280x720.

If you want 1080p 60FPS+ then you're going to need an Intel Core i7-4790K @ 4GHz, 8GB of RAM, and an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070. I'd like to see 4K 60FPS numbers, but given a GTX 1070 is required for just 1080p 60FPS @ Ultra graphics, I suspect we'll need GTX 1080 Ti or even TITAN Xp to reach 4K 60FPS @ Ultra.

AMD might have a shining star in the form of the Radeon RX Vega 56 with its $399 pricing (if you can find it @ that price), but with the BIOS flashed onto the card from the faster RX Vega 64... RX Vega 56 becomes an even better option.

Someone on the Chiphell forums has flashed their Radeon RX Vega 56 with the BIOS from the RX Vega 64, receiving around 10% performance improvement at stock clocks... and another 10% more performance when overclocked. When the modded RX Vega 56 was at stock clocks, it fell just 2% short of the RX Vega 64 performance. But when the RX Vega 56 was overclocked to 1650MHz GPU core, and 2200MHz on the 8GB of HBM2, it BEAT the RX Vega 64 by a good margin.

Now I'm going to be playing with this to see if I can get my RX Vega 56 up to the performance of the RX Vega 64... damn.

We're currently going through the first few weeks of AMD's new Radeon RX Vega graphics card launch, and we're now hearing about PCI-Express 4.0 and 5.0 from PCI-SIG, the organization behind the PCI-Express standard.

The upcoming PCIe 4.0 standard will ramp up the interconnect bandwidth from 8GT/s to 16GT/s, and will arrive sometime next year.

Then the big leap happens with PCIe 5.0 which will push it right up to 32GT/s, offering 128GB/sec through the PCIe 5.0 slot (compared to just 32GB/sec from PCIe 3.0 and 64GB/sec from PCIe 4.0).

AMD has just launched its Radeon RX Vega 56 graphics card, which is available right now in reference form, for $399. I talked with AMD on the phone yesterday, where they reiterated their stance on the $399 price, ensuring that AMD are underlining the sub $400 pricing.

Unfortunately, there aren't many Radeon RX Vega 56 graphics cards available with the limited supply being eaten up ridiculously fast, with more stock coming in the next couple of weeks. If you can get your hands-on the RX Vega 56, you'll be able to enjoy some 1080p and 1440p gaming at 60FPS+ which competes directly against the GeForce GTX 1070 from NVIDIA.

Pricing and availability aside, the Radeon RX Vega 56 is AMD's best Vega-based graphics card in my opinion. Radeon RX Vega 64 is priced too close, and in some cases more than the GTX 1080 and closer to GTX 1080 Ti, without having the performance to back up its massive price tag, power consumption and heat. Radeon RX Vega 56 is a much better alternative to the GTX 1070 if you're a FreeSync monitor owner, or Team Red supporter.

You can't knock AMD for getting Radeon RX Vega onto the market, and while it might have been late and not received as well as some thought, the cards are here - and there are tens of thousands of them so far.

I spoke to an industry source who didn't want to be named today, who said that AMD have shipped over 25,000 cards in the last two and a half weeks since Radeon RX Vega hit the market. Remember that AMD has only launched Radeon RX Vega 64, and not the Radeon RX Vega 56, which will be the more popular card of the two.

AMD will be launching Radeon RX Vega 56 very soon, and as we get closer to it, I will be doing much deeper testing into the real-world gaming performance of it. We'll be doing tests with DOOM, Quake Champions, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, and more at 1080p, 1440p, and 3440x1440.

Earlier this year my exclusive story about AMD only having around 16,000 units of its Radeon RX Vega graphics cards for the most proceeding the launch, and here we are now - with news that AMD will experience stock shortages until October.

According to DigiTimes' sources, AMD won't have Radeon RX Vega in larger numbers until October. Other sources claim that AMD are having issues with their Advanced Semiconductor Engineering packaging technology, but you know what? It doesn't matter what problems AMD are having, from their perspective - the Vega launch is nothing but a gigantic success.

But then you read the comments from people all over the internet calling the Vega launch the "worst GPU launch ever" and that it's "worse than the Fermi/GTX 480 launch"... and all I can do is agree. This isn't good, and we're not getting the full truth from AMD. The other thing that sucks is that AMD had such a great year from Ryzen and Threadripper, but Vega wasn't just mediocre, it has bombed.

If the scandals surrounding Radeon RX Vega 64 pricing weren't bad enough already, with AMD announcing it for $499 and then jacking the price up to $599... well now retailers are coughing up over $675 for the card.

A new report from TPU states that San Jose-based Ma Laboratories Inc. are charging $675 per Radeon RX Vega 64 air cooled card to computer stores. Now remember that AMD themselves launched RX Vega 64 @ $499... allowing retailers to make profits. But at much higher cost prices, retailers are going to be hurting significantly. I worked IT retail selling consumer PC components for 10 years, and if this were the case for my store - I would simply not stock Radeon on the shelves until the prices settled down.

Miners can't be blamed for this, as even with the new crypto-specific drivers and the Radeon RX Vega 64 Liquid Cooled Edition, I'm only getting 40MH/s of Ethereum mining performance. This is a good result, but considering I'm chewing close to 600W to do it... yeah, it's not good at all... and very unstable.

NVIDIA is strengthening its position with gamers, offering up their new GeForce 385.41 drivers which are Game Ready and optimized for what will surely be one of the biggest releases of the year: Destiny 2.

There are also some major improvements to ARK: Survival Evolved, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, F1 2017, Quake Champions, and more. Here's what to expect from NVIDIA's new GeForce 385.41 drivers, which you can download right here - or through GeForce Experience.

Feature Changes

It seems ASUS is working with AMD closely on the new Radeon RX Vega series of graphics cards, with ASUS being the first with a custom RX Vega 64 graphics card, and now again with RX Vega 56.

The new ASUS ROG Strix Vega 56 OC Edition 8GB features Aura Sync RGB technology, a triple-fan cooler and 2.5-slot design.

The card requires dual 8-pin PCIe power connectors, and rocks a DVI connector if you're still running an older LCD.

AMD might have launched Radeon RX Vega 56 at "$399" and the slightly faster Radeon RX Vega 64 at "$499" but those prices quickly changed for a reason that is, well... I don't even freakin' know. Remember our world exclusive piece on AMD having less than 16,000 units of Radeon RX Vega post-launch, and this continues to ring true as time goes on.

Both AMD and NVIDIA blame miners for global GPU shortages, and then gamers (for buying them so quickly with so much enthusiasm), and then there's reports of $100 rebates to partners and retailers that had exhausted them so quickly (from the lack of actual RX Vega cards) that the price shot up $100 overnight. Well, now it's even worse.

Having a quick look on Amazon and Newegg shows us that Radeon RX Vega 64 air-cooled is $719... far from the "$499" - and I keep using inverted commas because AMD launched RX Vega 64 at $499, but then it was $599 - and now it's $700+... I just don't know what to say anymore. But hey... you get Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus and Prey.

I remember AMD starting off their Ryzen Tech Day earlier this month in LA talking about how cryptocurrency miners are eating up all of the global GPU stock of Radeon RX series graphics cards. They were careful in launching their AMD Radeon RX Vega series of cards with miners waiting with bated breath on Vega performance.

Then came the #FakeNews that AMD Radeon RX Vega was pushing 100MH/s mining Ethereum, and anyone who mines Ethereum (like myself) knows that was pure "Hollywood magic", a spectacle. A performance; something that wasn't real, but perceived, as real. This turned out to be so completely unfounded, as I'm looking to my left and seeing the top of the line Radeon RX Vega 64 Liquid Cooled Edition and it is only pushing 33.6MH/s... This is only one-third of what the #FakeNews on RX Vega 64 mining performance.

But now Digital Trends has a story about AMD "Radeon" Studios, which is one of the better moves that AMD has done in the last couple of years - something you can read about here. One of the facts of Radeon Studios is Project 47, another one of the better things AMD has done in the last couple of years. Project 47 is a beast of a PC that has 1 petaflop of performance... perfect for Hollywood level operations.

Oculus cut the price of the Oculus Rift + Touch combo not too long ago now, but now HTC has followed through with a price cut of its own: $200 off the HTC Vive headset, bringing it down to just $599.

HTC said that the new $599 price on Vive isn't about getting rid of its first-gen headsets, but it's a competitive move against Oculus and its cut throat pricing. Oculus Rift + Touch is still $449, but at $150 cheaper is Oculus offering a better deal? Well, considering you get the controllers in the package - with HTC and Valve building the Vive with the Lighthouse controllers in mind - while Oculus sliced their developers in half offering an Xbox 360 controller in the box and then releasing Touch separately.

Now that the HTC Vive is $599. will you be stepping into the world of VR?

ASUS has officially revealed its next-gen ROG Strix Radeon RX Vega series of graphics card, led by the flagship ROG Strix RX Vega 64 O8G, making it one of the first custom Radeon RX Vega 64 cards announced.

ASUS has used a custom design PCB, using their new DirectCU III cooling solution that the company used on their flagship ROG Strix GTX 1080 Ti graphics card. We have a heat pipe with a direct contact base, with the heat pipes passing through two aluminum fin stacks on either end, which are then cooled by 3 x 100mm fans. These fans will not spin until the card hits a certain load.

The new card will use 8+8-pin PCIe power connectors, with ASUS using a 13-phase VRM, and overclocked GPU speeds that are close to the speeds on the Radeon RX Vega 64 Liquid Cooled Edition. ASUS will also have a "non-O8G" version of the card, which will be closer to the reference clocks, seeing GPU boost speeds of somewhere between 1495-1510MHz.