Graphics Cards - Page 210

NVIDIA's new Tesla V100 compute accelerators are total computing beasts, with systems available for north of $50,000 with 4 of them inside. NVIDIA has now given out a bunch of the first production Tesla V100 accelerators to AI researchers.

NVIDIA CEO and founder Jen-Hsun Huang hand delivered the Tesla V100 cards at their NVAIL (NVIDIA AI Labs) meet up, where Huang reiterated on NVIDIA's support of AI. He said: "AI is the most powerful technology force that we have ever known. I've seen everything. I've seen the coming and going of the client-server revolution. I've seen the coming and going of the PC revolution. Absolutely nothing compares".

Samsung has just announced that it is increasing the production of its 8GB HBM2 chips, in order for the company to "address rapidly growing market demand". Remember, that Samsung isn't providing HBM2 to AMD for their new Vega GPU architecture, but NVIDIA is tapping Samsung's own HBM2 chips.

The increased HBM2 production is to ensure that important and emerging markets like AI, HPC, advanced graphics, network systems, and enterprise servers are flooded with 8GB HBM2 chips.

Jaesoo Han, Executive VP of Memory Sales and Marketing for Samsung Electronics said: "By increasing production of the industry's only 8GB HBM2 solution now available, we are aiming to ensure that global IT system manufacturers have sufficient supply for timely development of new and upgraded systems. We will continue to deliver more advanced HBM2 line-ups, while closely cooperating with our global IT customers".

Now that people are getting AMD's new Radeon Vega Frontier Edition into their hands, we've arrived at the release of the Radeon Vega Frontier Liquid Edition, which provides more stable GPU clocks - and a higher TDP that consumes much more power than NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 1080 graphics card.

Our friends over at PC Perspective have tested the new Radeon Vega Frontier Liquid Edition, rocking its 375W TDP (the air-cooled Radeon Vega Frontier has a 300W TDP). AMD dropped the price of its Radeon Vega Frontier Edition just before release to $999, down from $1200 - while the liquid cooled version was $1800 (!!!) and dropped to $1200 at the last minute.

PCPer's testing shows us some interesting numbers, with the most interesting being power consumption. The performance of AMD's new Radeon Vega Frontier Liquid Edition is comparable to the GTX 1080, but the power consumption is off the charts - double GTX 1080s even in SLI.

If you're playing EVE: Valkyrie on your VR headset with your PC, you might want to know that NVIDIA has just annoucned its VRWorks Ultra graphics setting for EVE: Valkyrie.

The new VRWorks Ultra setting improves the quality of the cockpit lighting in EVE: Valkyrie, increases the quality of lighting and shadowing in every single area and level of the game, increases the fidelity of reflections and shadows, and even projectiles receive dynamic lights.

NVIDIA's press release says: "A lighting model developed by NVIDIA and incorporated by CCP for EVE: Valkyrie uses high-quality, physically-based lighting effects from NVIDIA Volumetric Lighting to add immersive, awe-inspiring shafts of bright light (God rays) to many scenes and levels, transforming their appearance. EVE: Valkyrie also includes a new anti-aliasing technique developed by NVIDIA called Multi-Sample G-Buffer Anti-Aliasing which improves anti-aliasing by further reducing visible aliasing of geometry edges and specular highlights, giving players a superior visual experience".

Colorful has just announced their latest graphics card family, the new Neptune series of card will be led by the flagship liquid-cooled iGame GTX 1080 Ti Neptune W.

The new Colorful iGame GTX 1080 Ti Neptune W is a beast, offering everything the GTX 1080 Ti has to offer with its GP102 GPU, 11GB of GDDR5X @ 11Gbps, but changes the game offering a liquid-cooler with a huge 240mm radiator. Colorful's new iGame GTX 1080 Ti Neptune W sports the company's Vultune Shield, which offers up RGB lights that can be controlled through Colorful's own iGame-Zone II software.

Cooling wise, the new iGame GTX 1080 Ti Neptune W rocks a waterblock base and copper pipes that are built with red copper that has "extreme thermal conductivity" that will push teh heat into the liquid cooler, and out through to the radiator. Colorful uses an integrated die cast aluminum plate on the card, while the two 120mm fans on the radiator will keep the card nice and cool - and virtually silent while running.

AMD's upcoming Radeon RX Vega is so close I can almost smell the PCB, and now we have news of 3 versions of Radeon RX Vega that gamers will have to choose from, something that we've heard previously. The names being used from 3DCenter are: Vega XTX, Vega XT, and Vega XL.

The cut-down Radeon RX Vega XL product reportedly has 3584 stream processors and a 285W TDP, with what I'm sure will be 8GB of HBM2, and I'm going out on a limb by saying this will be the GTX 1070 competitor. I'm hoping that AMD will release a Radeon RX Vega Nano, similar to the Radeon R9 Nano, but my sources said earlier this year "there will be no Nano-like RX Vega card". Boo.

There's no 16GB HBM2 model listed here, but I would say AMD will save the HBM2 chips for a dual-GPU card with 8GB HBM2 per GPU, for 16GB HBM2 total and 2 x Vega XT GPUs. This would be a monster, but I don't think AMD has the Vega or HBM2 yields to pull this off. I think we'll see Vega 20 with a dual-GPU offering later this year, or early 2018... before we start to float towards Navi.

AMD has released a new set of drivers ready for mining cards, with the new Radeon Software Crimson ReLive Edition 17.7.1 drivers. The new drivers also include some fixes for games and applications.

There have been new AMD Radeon RX 470-based mining cards released in the last few weeks, with the new 17.7.1 drivers supporting both the RX 460 and RX 470-based mining cards. There hasn't been a RX 460-based mining card announced, but there's support for it in the driver, so expect an announcement any minute now.

The new 17.7.1 drivers also include official support for the Radeon RX 550 and RX 560, cards that were launched in April. There are some issues fixed with Adobe Lightroom CC 2015 10, as well as some improvements to games like the crashing errors with Radeon 300 series cards running Final Fantasy XIV, and Little Nightmares. Radeon R9 380 series owners shouldn't have any issues with Tekken 7, either.

AMD is weeks away from launching the consumer-oriented Radeon RX Vega, but some gamers have got their hands-on the professional-oriented Radeon Vega Frontier Edition and ran it through its paces in games.

YouTuber 'DudeRandom84' has played around with the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition and Crysis 3, running it at 1440p with Very High settings enabled (including 2 x MSAA). Vega FE was pushing only 46FPS average, dipping below 35FPS in some points. This isn't the results most people are looking for, but there are a few caveats to be aware of.

First, this isn't the gaming card AMD is bringing out next month, this is a professional card that also games - not a gaming card that does professional content. Second, the drivers are still very early and I could almost put money down that AMD are making massive optimizations as we speak to not just Vega FE, but RX Vega. Third, I've been saying for a very long time that I expect the performance of Radeon RX Vega to not beat the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, and that it will sit somewhere between GTX 1080, GTX 1080 11Gbps and GTX 1080 Ti depending on the resolution and game used.

AMD has been all over the headlines for the leaks and rumors of its upcoming Radeon RX Vega graphics card, and the new professional-orientated Radeon Vega Frontier Edition, but gamers' seem to be shifting away from AMD and into the arms of #TeamGreen... in droves.

Steam's new Hardware & Software Survey for June 2017 is here, with some eye opening numbers. First off, NVIDIA's mid-range GeForce GTX 1060 is the most popular graphics card used by gamers on Steam, with 6.29% of gamers using a GTX 1060. These numbers are up from 4% in February, and 5.1% from May. NVIDIA takes out the top 19 graphics cards on Steam, with AMD's closest card being the Radeon HD 7700. None of the Radeon RX 400 or RX 500 series make the cut... well, if you count the Radeon RX 480 in the top 30 with 1.02%.

Overall, this is where we stand: NVIDIA has 63.61%, AMD has 20.5%, and Intel has a surprising 15.5% of the Steam gamers using their graphics cards/APUs/integrated graphics. Intel surprises with 15.5%, as it's very close to AMD's 20.5%. This might change with Radeon RX Vega, but I think it'll only change by a couple of percentage points. If the mid-range Radeon RX 500 series didn't even enter the charts... then I think AMD has some serious changes to make to get into the hearts and souls of PC gamers.

There's a significant rumor on AMD's upcoming Radeon RX Vega graphics card, with WCCFTech reporting that there's a new listing of RX Vega with the code 687F:C1, showing details on RX Vega's GPU clocks, HBM2 clocks and memory bandwidth.

As previously rumored, AMD will reportedly launch the Radeon RX Vega with 8GB of HBM2, featuring memory bandwidth of 484GB/sec. The GPU will be clocked at 1630MHz, which is a big jump over the 1200MHz GPU clocks in previous rumors. The 8GB of HBM2 is also clocked higher than previous rumors, from 700MHz up to 945MHz.

Performance wise, it seems to be dropping right into where I expected it to hit: a competitor to NVIDIA's refreshed GeForce GTX 1080 with its 8GB of GDDR5X clocked at 11Gbps. AMD's new Radeon RX Vega hits 31,873 graphics score in 3DMark 11, which is around 4000 more than the GTX 1080 and double the score of the GTX 1070. The GTX 1080 Ti is still much faster, but I think we'll see another competitor in a few months for the GTX 1080 Ti in Vega form. For now, GTX 1080 11Gbps performance is great... for AMD, as FreeSync gaming displays are significantly cheaper than their G-Sync counterparts.

In the quest for GPU dominance, we'll see both NVIDIA and AMD shifting away from increasingly larger GPU dies, to many smaller GPU dies. NVIDIA has recently talked about building a MCM package (Multi-Chip-Module package) that is a collection of chips (GPU/CPU/memory/controllers) onto the same chip interposer (similar to GPU/HBM on the interposer of Fiji/Fury X and Vega/RX Vega) that are interconnected through ridiculously fast I/O lanes.

This has already been done, but not on the consumer side of NVIDIA's GeForce graphics cards. AMD is ahead of the game here, as they're using their next-gen Infinity Fabric link between EPYC CPU dies, with 8 cores per die that are interconnected through Infinity Fabric. AMD will be using this same method for their next-gen Navi GPU architecture, which should debut sometime later this year or in 2018.

NVIDIA is proposing that their MCM design might be very different to the traditional design of massive GPU and a couple of DRAM dies on the package, changing it over to MCM and using smaller versions of their GPUs - but just many more of them, as well as much more DRAM dies. The GPU and DRAM dies would be connected through I/O and the controller chipset on-die, versus on-chip.

With the Ethereum mining boom exploding and creating a black hole for all Radeon RX 470/480 and RX 570/580 graphics cards, AMD has a massive inventory of Radeon RX 460 graphics cards that the company will be upgrading to the purported Radeon RX 560D.

The news is coming from MyDrivers, which is reporting that the Radeon RX 560D will have 896 stream processors, meaning the RX 560D is a simple rebrand of the RX 460. MyDrivers says that the new Radeon RX 560D will use up to 50% less power than the RX 560, which could make it perfect for mining. If you had 6 x RX 560Ds per machine and had many of those machines... well... that could be a cheap little power efficient beast for ETH mining.

NVIDIA has made quite the strange move overnight, where the company has enabled DX12 support for their older Fermi GPU architecture, enabling DX12 for the GeForce GTX 400 and GTX 500 series graphics cards.

If you've got an older GTX 400 or GTX 500 series card, you'll need their latest GeForce 384.76 drivers, which will enable DX12 support. WCCFTech re-benchmarked their older GeForce GTX 580 with DX12 and thrown it into 3DMark and Battlefield 1, but there is a performance drop with DX12 enabled in BF1. WCCFTech's benchmarks show BF1 hitting 43FPS average or so with the High preset @ 1080p, while the GTX 580 with DX12 enabled drops to just 34FPS average.

Still, DX12 enabled on Fermi is an interesting move for NVIDIA... very interesting.

I'm sure that most of you how just how addicted I am to technology, so when I find a YouTuber streaming 8K gaming at 60FPS, it begins to have weird effects on my body.

YouTuber 'ThirtyIR' runs an absolute beast of a gaming PC, powered by Dell's new UP3218K display with its native 8K resolution - a huge 7680x4320, the only 8K monitor on the market. Inside, ThirtyIR runs a huge 4 x TITAN Xp graphics cards, all powered by an Intel Core i7-6950X processor, ASUS Rampage V Extreme, and 64GB of Corsair Dominator Platinum DDR-3200 RAM. It's all run with a Corsair AX1500i PSU, plenty of power to handle the 4-way GPUs.

His latest stream was of Battlefield: Bad Company 2, running it at 8K on his 4-way TITAN Xp graphics cards, and it looked beautiful. You can playback 8K content on YouTube, which takes a damn lot of CPU horsepower to run on Opera and Chrome, but Microsoft's own Edge browser in Windows 10 has better GPU scaling in the browser, making it a useful switch - at least for when you're watching 8K video on YouTube.

AMD has finally confirmed it will be indeed launching Radeon RX Vega at SIGGRAPH 2017, which takes place in LA between July 30 and August 3. I will be on the ground at SIGGRAPH, covering the event itself, and everything AMD will be announcing - including Radeon RX Vega - at the show.

The official Radeon Twitter account tweeted: "We can't wait to announce our new Vega products, including RX at this year's #SIGGRAPH - make sure to follow us for more details". Boom. Radeon RX Vega confirmed for an early August reveal, but I'm confident we'll hear much more from AMD between then and now, and I'm sure some NDAs will be thrown onto the table, too.

AMD launched its new Radeon Vega Frontier Edition recently, with some so-so gaming performance that rivals a GeForce GTX 1070, but even some of the largest people in the tech industry - including influential tech YouTubers, are comparing its gaming performance against gaming-focused cards. It's not a gaming-orientated card, but a professional card that can game if the owner wants to, instead of switching between graphics cards for professional, and then personal/gaming use.

AMD's new Radeon Vega Frontier Edition graphics card is now here, with some consumers getting their cards a little early - and making me feel like I'm missing out on one of the most exciting technology product releases of 2017... boo. YouTuber 'JERICO JERICO' has received his Radeon Vega Frontier from SaberPC on 6/27 with overnight shipping... receiving it, and unboxing it - as you can see in the embedded video below.

As you can see in the video, the card comes as a pretty barebones package, but once it's out of the packaging the true beauty is shown. The beautiful blue and yellow mix is absolutely vibrant, with the 'R' logo in the upper corner next to some GPU tach LEDs that light up blue. The 'Vega' logo is on the front of the card, looking like a cow being stamped with its branding - and I really dig it.

I can't wait to get an AMD Radeon Vega Frontier Edition in my hands, but it's next to impossible right now.

AMD's new Radeon Vega Frontier Edition graphics cards are slowly getting into consumers' hands, with one user showing us everything: the box, the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition itself in the beyond gorgeous blue/yellow design, and some very early benchmarks.

WCCFTech commentor 'Klaudius' has the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition card, running it on his Core i7-4790K processor, ASUS Maximus VII Impact motherboard, 16GB DDR3, and Samsung 850 EVO SSD with Windows 10 installed. He installed the new Radeon Vega Frontier optimized drivers from AMD, which allow Radeon Vega Frontier owners to switch between Pro and Gaming Modes.

Benchmarks were run, with 3DMark Performance/Extreme/Ultra benchmarks run. The new Radeon Vega Frontier Edition loses to the GTX 1080 overclocked, with a 4K benchmark score in 3DMark FireStrike Ultra of 5216 - compared to around 5000 that the GTX 1080 is capable of. This is at 4K, where HBM2 and HBCC should shine, but I'm sure AMD are still weeks away from final release drivers which should have plenty of optimizations included.

SAPPHIRE has announced its new cryptocurrency mining specific GPUs, which are coming in a new 'Mining Edition' set of cards with both 4GB and 8GB versions of AMD's Radeon RX 400 and 500 series cards. Ethereum mining is blowing up right now, and I have been all over it building a 41 GPU setup on 10 systems mining 1GH/s.

SAPPHIRE has announced 5 new Mining Edition cards, with British pound pricing from pre-orders on OverclockersUK:

All of the Radeon RX 470 versions of SAPPHIRE's new Mining Edition cards don't have any display outputs, but the SAPPHIRE Radeon RX 560 Mining Edition 4GB does feature 1 x DVI port. SAPPHIRE is offering two of its Mining Edition cards with Samsung-made GDDR5 with options for either 4GB or 8GB with Samsung DRAM.

AMD has been going on a Vega rampage recently, and while there are no Vega-based graphics cards in anyone's hands just yet, we're hearing about yet another Vega-based graphics card: the Radeon Pro WX 9100.

The new Radeon Pro WX 9100 was reported on by VideoCardz, with 4096 stream processors, 16GB of HBM2 on a 2048-bit memory bus. The new WX 9100 card will feature a Vega GPU, and will surely be one of the fastest graphics cards on the market, succeeding the Polaris 10-based Radeon Pro WX 7100. The new Radeon Pro WX 9100 and its 4096 stream processors would be 1792 cores more than the WX 7100, making it quite the beast. Not only that, but the Radeon Pro WX 9100 will utilize HBM2, compared to the GDDR5 on the WX 7100.

With the release of the new Radeon Vega Frontier Edition, it looks like AMD will be aiming the Vega Frontier Edition at game developers (including Gaming Mode) and the new Radeon Pro WX 9100 at professionals in the design and manufacturing industries.

AMD has launched its new Radeon Vega Frontier graphics cards in paper launch fashion with no samples going out to any media, not just outlets like TweakTown, but did you know it has something called 'Gaming Mode'?! Neither did we.

Radeon Vega Frontier Edition rocks Gaming Mode for those times between your professional and gaming lives, where you want to squeeze in some Prey, DOOM, or Battlegrounds goodness. Content creators can switch to "gaming mode" in Radeon Settings, which will change the card from "Radeon Pro Mode" into "Gaming Mode".