Graphics Cards - Page 212

MWC 2017 - Qualcomm recently launched into the stratosphere with its push for 5G technology leadership, but now the company has announced its Snapdragon 835 Virtual Reality Development Kit.

Qualcomm's new Snapdragon 835 processor is the heart and soul of the new VRDK, providing developers with early access to VR HMDs powered by the Snapdragon 835, something that includes an upgraded VR SDK that works with the headset. Cristiano Amon, Executive Vice President for Qualcomm Technologies., and President of QT, said: "With this new VRDK, we're providing virtual reality application developers with advanced tools and technologies to accelerate a new generation of VR games, 360-degree VR videos and a variety of interactive education, healthcare and entertainment applications".

He continued: "We see great potential for the exciting new experiences made possible by truly mobile, untethered virtual reality that's always connected to the internet, and we're excited to help mobile VR developers more efficiently deliver compelling and high-quality experiences on upcoming Snapdragon 835 VR-capable products".

AMD launched its new Ryzen CPUs with a brief tease of Radeon Vega, in the form of the new Radeon Vega logo being shown on the year to come for AMD.

The company had some of its new Radeon Vega graphics cards on show at its Ryzen Tech Day event, with some great photos taken by ComputerBase.

The company had a Radeon Vega graphics card in plain sight, rocking an 8+6-pin PCIe power setup.

Anyone who loves GPU technology, graphics cards, or gaming will mark February 28 on their calendars as the day everything changes. AMD is hosting their second annual Capsaicin event during GDC 2017 where we're going to see "exciting new details" on Radeon Vega, with NVIDIA choosing the same day to host their own Editor's Day to unveil the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti.

NVIDIA is now teasing the GTX 1080 Ti on their official GeForce.com website, teasing a video that runs in the background saying "It's Almost Time #UltimateGeForce" with the 'Ti' in 'Time' being highlighted. Ti = GTX 1080 Ti for the uninitiated.

VideoCardz.com checked out the HTML code of the website, and noticed that it was actually called "GTX 1080 Ti Countdown"... so, there you have it. GTX 1080 Ti will be unveiled in a few days time, as well as more details on Radeon Vega. I seriously, can barely contain my excitement.

AMD held their Ryzen Tech Day in San Francisco a few days ago, unveiling 3 new Ryzen CPUs in the form of the Ryzen 7 1800X, Ryzen 7 1700X, and the Ryzen 7 1700. It looks like we'll be introduced to more details on Radeon Vega, AMD's next-gen GPU architecture that uses HBM2 and the exciting HBC (High Bandwidth Cache) - as well as the Vega GPU architecture itself.

The company has now confirmed the second annual "Capsaicin Live" event in San Francisco during GDC 2017, which kicks off on February 28 at 10:30AM PT. In the press release, AMD teases: "Hosted by Radeon Technologies Group's Senior Vice President and Chief Architect, Raja Koduri, the show will be a celebration of PC gaming, the technology steering its future, and the developers who work tirelessly to transform their imaginations into tomorrow's blockbuster games".

AMD continues: "The one-hour live event will offer PC gaming enthusiasts and developers around the world a preview of AMD's latest graphics and processor technologies, reveal exciting new details surrounding Vega, and showcase the summer's most anticipated PC and VR games from visionary game developers. Named after the legendary component in chili peppers that adds an addictive kick to spicy foods, "Capsaicin Live" explores the essence and creative power of the graphics processing unit (GPU), evoking the magic that game and VR developers create every day when they turn raw code into exciting, memorable, and addicting experiences".

It looks like NVIDIA is finally, after months and months of rumors, preparing its GeForce GTX 1080 Ti for launch - with new rumors stating the card would launch between March 20-23.

NVIDIA is hosting its own event during GDC 2017, where we should hopefully see the GTX 1080 Ti unveiled - but what should we expect in terms of raw horsepower and specs? Well, it should be a Titan X at the end of the day, with some reduction in SMs, with 52 SMs, compared to 60 SMs found on the Titan X.

This means we are to expect around 10.8 TFLOPs of performance, barely down from the 11 TFLOPs on Titan X. We should see AIB partners with tweaked and overclocked GTX 1080 Ti graphics cards, with Titan X beating performance - which is going to be a very, very big deal.

AMD has teased that it is hosting its hopefully yearly tradition of Capsaicin at GDC 2017 in just two weeks time, but now the rumor mill is churning with WCCFTech reporting that the Radeon RX 500 series will feature both Vega and Polaris GPUs.

We still don't know much about Vega, where we should hopefully see the high-end Vega 10 GPU featuring 4096 stream processors, and up to 12.5 TFLOPs of performance with 8GB of HBM2. This part will be the enthusiast card that we've all been dreaming of from AMD, but the company will also fill out the Radeon RX 500 series with Polaris GPUs, according to the site.

This makes sense, but I'd rather see Vega pushed on its own - similar to how they pushed Fiji on its own brand with Radeon R9 Fury X. AMD could name the Vega cards Radeon RX Vega 10, Radeon RX Vega 11 - and then the Polaris-powered parts Radeon RX 580, RX 570, and so on.

This is an event I've been dying to tell you all about: AMD will be hosting their new Capsaicin event during the Game Developers Conference on February 28.

During GDC 2016, AMD hosted their first Capsaicin event where we got to see the Radeon Pro Duo and a bigger tease of Polaris 10 before its release a few months later. But what should we expect from Capsaicin this year? Well, I expect a larger tease of Vega - in fact, I'd really enjoy a massive unveiling of Vega at Capsaicin.

You'll be able to tune into the Capsaicin livestream, which will begin at 10:30AM on February 28, which AMD teases as a "feature-packed show highlighting the hottest new graphics and VR technologies propelling the games industry forward".

EVGA had some issues with its original GTX 1080 graphics card, but the company is looking to announce new ICX-based GTX 1080 graphics cards in both the GTX 1070 and GTX 1080 parts.

EVGA is expected to refresh its GTX 10 series cards with improved thermals, with the "optional" thermal pads now the norm, with a new and improved PCB on the upcoming SuperClocked 2 and FTW2 models.

Jacob Freeman took to Twitter to tease: "I C something eXciting announcing this week", and I don't think he could've been any more clear.

AMD is gearing up for the betas of both Conan Exiles and Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Wildlands, with the release of the new Crimson ReLive Edition 17.1.2 WHQL drivers. Get the new Crimson ReLive Edition 17.1.2 drivers right here.

The new drivers also have some fixes included, where "Changing memory clocks with Radeon WattMan with more than one display connected may cause memory clocks to intermittently become stuck at their minimum setting or switch between min and max ranges intermittently causing display flickering" is fixed.

Radeon Software Crimson ReLive Edition 17.1.2 WHQL Highlights

NVIDIA has released its new GP100-based Quadro product, joining the Tesla P100 in the full-fat Pascal goodness for professional graphics. The new Quadro GP100 features 16GB of super-fast HBM2, and some huge performance numbers to match.

We're looking at FP64 calculations of 5.3TFLOPs, while FP32 performance hits 10.6TFLOPs, and FP16 with 20.7TFLOPs. The GP100 itself features 16GB of HBM2, 4 x DP 1.4 and a single DVI-D. NVLink makes an appearance, with the flashy new interconnect powering two of NVIDIA's new Quadro GP100 graphics cards.

Throwing two Quadro GP100s together over NVLink offers 32GB of HBM2 pooled, for serious workstation power. NVIDIA will be pushing out their Quadro GP100 graphics cards to HP and Dell customers for workstation configurations next month.

I've just written about SK Hynix's new dates for HBM2 deployment, which will affect AMD's Vega GPU roll out a little, but we're still getting Vega graphics cards in Q2 2017.

AMD confirmed the news during their latest financial report, where they said: "AMD introduced preliminary details of its forthcoming Vega GPU architecture designed to address the most data- and visually-intensive next-generation workloads. Key architecture advancements include a differentiated memory subsystem, next-generation geometry pipeline, new compute engine, and a new pixel engine. GPU products based on the Vega architecture are expected to ship in the second quarter of 2017".

As for the new Vega graphics cards with HBM2, we should expect 8GB of HBM2 with just under 410GB/sec bandwidth - and a release later in the year with the faster 512GB/sec HBM2.

AMD is expected to launch its Vega graphics cards in the next couple of months, with an unveiling in May and a launch in June to be expected - but now SK Hynix have updated their memory product catalog, giving us a better look at the bandwidth numbers around HBM2.

SK Hynix updated their graphics databook, showing off HBM2 for Q4 2016 with a 4-stack 4GB HBM2 product with two different speeds: 2Gbps and 1.6Gbps, with 256GB/sec bandwidth and 204GB/sec bandwidth, respectively. This has now changed, with a shift in availability.

The company is now listing the slower 1.6Gbps (204.8GB/sec) for Q1 2017, while the faster 2Gbps (256GB/sec) HBM2 now stuck with a 'TBD' for availability. This could lead AMD to launch a slower HBM2-based card in Q2, and a faster Vega graphics card later in the year.

NVIDIA launched its super successful GeForce GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 graphics cards back in May, announcing they would be building their own 'Founders Edition' variants at the time. I remember thinking when NVIDIA announced the FE version of the cards, that it would begin hurting AIB partners - turning to YouTuber 'JayzTwoCents' and meeting his eyes with the same conclusion.

Taiwanese tech site DigiTimes has reported that due to 'increasing sales and profits earned by NVIDIA from PC-use graphics cards has prompted the company to actively promote sales of the Founders Edition graphics cards'. In other words, Founders Edition cards will be eating into the orders for the GTX 10 series partners' supply, resulting in price hikes and loss of sales for companies like ASUS, MSI, ZOTAC, GIGABYTE, and others.

Throughout 2016, the six largest graphics card suppliers in ASUS, GIGABYTE, MSI, Palit, ZOTAC, and Colorful - they made $159.4 million in profits. This saw NVIDIA interested in the growing graphics card market, and wanting to take a slice of that pie - even though the pieces of that pie, are selling NVIDIA pie - and it makes a share of those profits as the GPUs and resulting technology and trademarks are owned by NVIDIA.

ASUS, GIGABYTE, and MSI will be increasing retail pricing for its motherboards and graphics cards in China starting next month, right after the 2017 Lunar New Year holidays, according to sources of DigiTimes.

They reported: "The sources expect the motherboard players to raise their product prices by around 5%. Since demand for motherboards has not been strong for the past few years, maintaining sales with the price increases will be a major task for the players".

The same sources said that Intel's new Kaby Lake-capable 200 series motherboards and NVIDIA's latest GeForce GTX 10 series graphics cards will be increased in price in China. DigiTimes continued: "Currently, NVIDIA's GTX 1080 and 1070 GPUs are in shortage due to issues at an upstream foundry partner. Although NVIDIA tried to shift its orders to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), TSMC's fully loaded capacity is expected to prolong the shortages. As a result, NVIDIA has been adjusting its GPU supply to graphics card vendors recently and this has caused graphics card prices to rise".

I still remember when AMD launched the Radeon Pro Duo nearly a year ago now, but it was aimed at the prosumer market, and priced rightfully so. Until now.

AMD and its various AIB partners have dropped the price on the Radeon Pro Duo from nearly $1500, to just $799 - not bad considering it's the fastest graphics card from Radeon Technologies Group. The Radeon Pro Duo rocks dual Fiji GPUs with 4GB of HBM1 each, for a total of 8GB of HBM1.

Each of the Fiji GPUs has 4096 stream processors (8196 total) - making the Radeon Pro Duo feature the highest GPU cores of any graphics card, ever. We have 64 ROPs and 256 TMUs per GPU, with each Fiji GPU running at 1000MHz.

GIGABYTE kicked some serious graphics card ass in 2016 with their solid Xtreme Gaming series, but the company is shifting gears into the Aorus brand.

The first Aorus-based graphics card will be the GeForce GTX 1080 Xtreme Edition, slightly modified from the Xtreme Gaming series card. The Aorus GeForce GTX 1080 Xtreme Edition features clocks of 1784/1936MHz for base and boost, respectively.

The usual 8GB of GDDR5X is here at the standard 10GHz, with 2 x 8-pin PCIe power connectors that will ensure the Aorus GTX 1080 Xtreme Edition will smash past 2GHz on a GPU overclock. But now we'll talk about how the Aorus version is different to the Xtreme Gaming version.

Now that I'm back home and at my desktop, I'm sinking my teeth into everything GPU related that has happened over the last couple of weeks. First, we've had the official unveiling of the Vega GPU architecture that will be launching in May. Second, leaked decks of AMD's upcoming GPUs have appeared online, teasing Vega 10 and its dual-GPU brother, Vega 20 - and even Navi 10, oh and the dual-GPU version of Navi 10.

If you thought Vega 10 was going to be it, you'll have to wait for the dual-GPU version expected in late-2017 with 1.5x the performance. Right now, Vega 10 will consume around 225W according to the leaked slides and my industry sources. We might see this reduced if AMD keeps its reference card to under 200W, allowing AIB partner cards to clock the hell out of the Vega 10 GPU and leap up to 250-300W.

The dual-Vega 10 graphics card will most likely arrive as a reference only card from AMD, featuring a 300W TDP and dual Vega 10 GPUs. The clocks will be reduced as all dual-GPU cards experience, so we should see it drop from 1465MHz on the estimated GPU clocks of Vega 10, to 1000-1200MHz. This will let the card scale well, to around 1.5x the performance of a single Vega 10 graphics card, while hitting the 300W ceiling on power consumption. I'm expecting a heftier cooler, and 16GB of HBM2 on the dual Vega 10 graphics card.

AMD is set to launch its next-gen Vega graphics cards in May, with an event just before Computex - just as the Polaris-based Radeon RX 400 series cards were unveiled in Macau, just before Computex 2016. If you haven't seen my '5 reasons why AMD's next-gen Vega is going to kick ass' article, you should - and then come back here to enjoy the rest.

We're hearing that AMD will launch its enthusiast SKU of the Vega 10-based GPU, powered by 8GB of HBM2 memory. 8GB might not sound like much, but if you want to read how it will be impressive - I have teased a little about High Bandwidth Cache (HBC) - which is a large part of how AMD is going to dominate the GPU game in 2017, and beyond.

As for pricing, I think we're going to be looking at around $799-$899 for the Vega 10 graphics card with 8GB of HBM2, which should slot right next to my expected $899 pricing on the GTX 1080 Ti from NVIDIA. We should expect reference cards from AMD that are deliciously sexy, and very powerful - offering 4K 60FPS performance from a single GPU.

CES 2017 - Last month when AMD unveiled their ambitious new Vega plan, I had to decompress half of it over weeks - because there's just so much. During CES, I had some one-on-one time with various RTG members, and began thinking of the future of Radeon.

I plan a series of articles on Vega, but we need to split them into a few different parts - where I want to talk more about High Bandwidth Cache, and what it could mean not just for Vega, but for the future of gaming.

We have been stuck in this world of 'more is better' and that the larger the amount of VRAM on a graphics card, the better it is. I know that's not how it works, but after 10 years in retail IT sales selling graphics cards, custom gaming PCs and everything in between - most consumers think 'higher numbers = better/faster'.

CES 2017 - This year, the Consumer Electronics Show was a massive overload of technology unveilings, announcements, teases, and more. There has been so much unveiled that it would take weeks to disassemble and dissect all of it - but this is why we have our 'Best of CES 2017' awards, and this article. Below we list the products and tech that were lucky enough to get our award.

Let's kick things off with the CPU and GPU side of things:

CPU: AMD has impressed not just us, but gamers and consumers throughout the world with their next generation Ryzen CPUs. We're looking at 16-threaded CPUs that should hopefully come in at half the price of Intel's competing processors, offering new technologies like SenseMI - a self-overclocking, self-adjusting processor that learns how you use your system and predicts your next movement. Expect much more from us here at TweakTown on Ryzen in the coming weeks and months.