Graphics Cards - Page 217

Can you believe it has been an entire year since AMD announced it was forming Radeon Technologies Group, a newly-focused team that had a hungry new thirst for the GPU market.

AMD formed the Radeon Technologies Group with a bang late last year in Sonoma, California, where it announced the new Polaris architecture and a tease of a new card that was capable of 1080p 60FPS using less than 100W of power. In that time, AMD has launched the exciting new Radeon RX 480 and landing new semi-custom designs with Microsoft and Sony for the Xbox One S that just launched, the new PS4 Pro coming soon, and the upcoming 4K-capable Xbox Scorpio console in 2017.

Radeon Technologies Group boss Raja Koduri (which on a personal note, I'm going to add is a super chill guy in real life who I've enjoyed a few ice creams with in the last 12 months after our random 3am icecream with the RTG guys and girls at CES earlier this year in the freezing night of Las Vegas) said: "We managed to bring the focus back to graphics and turned around the erosion that happened over the last few years".

MSI is celebrating its 30th anniversary with the announcement of an exclusive limited edition graphics card, featuring a unique custom-designed EK waterblock and the GeForce GTX 1080 at its core.

The MSI GeForce GTX 1080 30th Anniversary graphics card features an exclusive closed loop liquid cooler from EK Water Blocks, with the newly designed EK-XLC Predator 120 All-In-On, with EK Water Blocks' R&D boss Niko Tivar explaining: "EK Water Blocks is very proud to be part of MSI 30 th Anniversary celebration and exclusively for this project, we engineered and designed EK-XLC Predator 120 All-In-On liquid cooler, that is not available anywhere else".

As you can expect, MSI has tweaked the GTX 1080 Anniversary graphics card, with the GPU clocked at 1721/1860MHz for base/boost clocks, respectively. The same 8GB of GDDR5X is found on the card, and cooled by the full cover EK Predator liquid cooler.

NVIDIA is positioning themselves for a huge show at CES 2017, teasing that it will have major announcements on gaming and VR products, as well as the usual development updates in AI and autonomous car technology.

NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang will be on stage for a keynote at the Consumer Electronics Show in January, with NVIDIA teasing: "When Huang takes the stage, you can be sure he'll break news in some of the areas we're focused on: artificial intelligence, self-driving cars, virtual reality, and gaming".

What could NVIDIA unveil? We could expect a big reveal of their next-gen Volta architecture, but I think this is something we'll see at NVIDIA's own GPU Technology Conference later a few months after CES 2017, but what about VR and gaming? NVIDIA could unveil the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, a new Shield, or the Shield VR - which I've been saying for years that NVIDIA is working on a Shield-branded VR headset.

Samsung has been using various Qualcomm processors in its Galaxy-branded smartphones over the years, slowly shifting its reliance to the Exynos processor, a chip that Samsung created, and manufactures itself.

There are now reports surfacing from SamMobile that tease a possible future where Samsung could be using GPU technology from either AMD or NVIDIA, which could make for an interesting upcoming change in the smartphone industry. NVIDIA has its impressive Pascal architecture on the 16nm FinFET process made by TSMC, but it has also just signed a deal for Samsung to manufacturer its second wave of Pascal GPUs on their 14nm FinFET process.

AMD has launched its new Polaris architecture made on the 14nm FinFET process over at GlobalFoundries, and have just had major semi-contract wins with the new Xbox One S and upcoming Xbox Scorpio consoles from Microsoft, as well as the new PS4 Slim and PS4 Pro consoles for Sony.

AMD's Radeon Software Crimson Edition 16.9.1 driver is available now, and with it comes some much appreciated game optimizations and bug fixes, as usual.

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided supports DirectX 12 today from the game developer end, and with this driver, from AMD's end, too, so you should have no trouble running the game with buttery smoothness.

The other game to get some TLC is DOTA 2, which has been bestowed with a DirectX 11 CrossFire profile.

AMD has the lower- and mid-range GPU market tied with its Radeon RX 460 and RX 470 graphics cards, but NVIDIA is looking to enter the mid-range GPU game with its Pascal architecture in the purported GeForce GTX 1050.

Reports surfaced over the weekend of a GP107-powered GeForce GTX 1050, with its GPU featuring 768 CUDA cores, and 4GB of GDDR5 on a 128-bit memory bus with 112GB/sec memory bandwidth. It looks like the GPU will be clocked at 1316MHz with a boost clock of 1752MHz.

NVIDIA's upcoming GeForce GTX 1050 will reportedly have a TDP of just 75W, so we could expect GTX 1050s to arrive without an additional PCIe power connector. As for the price, considering the GeForce GTX 1060 is priced at $299 for the Founders Edition, the GTX 1050 will need to be priced at $150-$200 to better compete against the Polaris-based offerings from AMD.

GDDR5X debuted on NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 1080 earlier this year, and then we saw 12GB of GDDR5X powering the super-powerful Pascal-based Titan X. Now we have GDDR6 being prepped for a debut sometime in 2018.

GDDR6 will increase the bandwidth to over 14Gbps, up from the already generous 10Gbps offered by GDDR5X, and up greatly from the now-current bandwidth of new GDDR5-based cards at 8Gbps - before then, it was 7Gbps for GDDR5. GDDR6 is also more power efficient, with it being around 20% more efficient over GDDR5.

I'd expect to see GDDR6 in the cards for AMD and NVIDIA for 2018, with NVIDIA set to use GDDR5X on its flagship graphics cards into 2017 alongside HBM2 on the upcoming Volta architecture. AMD has Vega planned for the first half of 2017, which will utilize HBM2 memory - but only if HBM2 supply isn't ridiculously expensive at the time, and is available in high volume.

You might be too busy enjoying the Battlefield 1 open beta right now to realize AMD has released new Radeon Software Crimson Edition drivers that are ready for both Deus Ex: Mankind Divided and Battlefield 1. You can grab the new drivers right here.

AMD says it has also added new DX11 CrossFire profiles for both games, with the new 16.8.3 hotfix solving some of the issues with random blank or colored screens when gaming on Radeon RX 400 series cards. AMD is also working on various other issues, noting that there are a list of things the company is working on as we speak:

Download the new Radeon Software Crimson Edition 16.8.3 drivers here.

AMD has confirmed it will be launching its next generation Vega architecture in the first half of 2017, saying it will launch Vega-based graphics cards for the "enthusiast market" in 1H 2017. The last we heard, Vega-based graphics cards were launching in March 2017.

If we look at the Polaris announcement to retail launch, it was announced in December 2015 and released to market with the introduction of the Radeon RX 480 graphics card in the last days of June. If the same timeframe is used for Vega, we should expect an unveiling in December and a launch earlier than Polaris, and maybe sometime in March-April in order to make a bigger impact on the market - especially against NVIDIA's formidable Pascal-powered graphics cards.

AMD's next-gen Vega architecture will be an interesting upgrade over Polaris, which I've been hearing from industry sources will be a superior architecture in many ways. Vega will be using HBM2 technology, so we can expect much more VRAM than the HBM1-based Radeon R9 Fury X offered, which featured just 4GB of HBM1. We will probably see 8GB and 12GB models, but I'd like to see a higher-end Vega graphics card with 16GB of HBM2 - ok, AMD?

I reported on HBM3 a few days ago, but all of the details weren't clear - until the Hot Chips conference in Cupertino this week, where Samsung and SK Hynix shared some more details on the next leap in HBM technology.

HBM3 will offer improvements over HBM1 and HBM2 in nearly all areas, with HBM3 offering more RAM stacks. HBM3 will feature 8 or more stacks connected via through-silicon vias (TSVs), which is up from the 2/4/8 stacks on HBM2. The upgraded HBM3 tech will see individual memory dies of up to 16Gb, up from the 8Gb on HBM2, meaning 64GB of VRAM on next-gen graphics cards will become a reality.

Lower core voltage and twice the peak bandwidth will be offered on HBM3, which is another great thing to see, but HBM3 won't be arriving until sometime in 2019-2020.

NVIDIA revealed its Tesla P100 graphics card at its GPU Technology Conference earlier this year, the first Pascal-based graphics card, and the first HBM2-powered card from NVIDIA. It was a compute monster, and it was only today during the annual Hot Chips symposium that NVIDIA revealed their first die shot of the 610mm2 GPU die.

The company released the GP100 die shot as part of their presentation on Pascal and NVLink 1.0, but die shots have not frequent from both NVIDIA and AMD, so it's nice to see the GP100 die out in the wild. GP100 is NVIDIA's first part that features HBM and NVLink, which is an important time in the company's history, as this exciting technology isn't available for the consumer GeForce graphics cards... yet.

NVIDIA's new GP100 die shot teases the HBM2 interfaces at the top and bottom of the picture, with the 4096-bit memory bus able to transfer information at over 1TB/sec.

AMD is continuing its push against NVIDIA, securing itself more discrete GPU market share from NVIDIA according to the latest data from Mercury Research, which has AMD gaining throughout 2016.

Mercury Research's data shows that AMD has gained GPU market share for the fourth consecutive quarter, driven by strong GPU sales in late 2015 and throughout 2016. AMD has pulled itself up to 29.9% market share, which is a big deal considering this time last year AMD was sitting at around 18%. This is a big deal, as Mercury Research notes in their press release that this is the first time AMD has experienced an increase since Q1 2012.

Where did AMD's gains come from? According to the report: "The decline in low-end units shipped by NVIDIA resulted in substantial unit share gains for AMD in the desktop standalone segment, though by our estimates revenue share was unaffected due to NVIDIA's strong gaming mix improvement". So AMD is hitting the lower/mid-end markets while NVIDIA doesn't just dominate, it owns the high-end market right now.

PCIe 3.0 has been a staple of motherboards and graphics cards for close to 6 years now, but the PCI Special Interest Group (PCI-SIG) have PCIe 4.0 nearly ready, and man is it going to be a huge launch.

The upgraded PCIe 4.0 specification will allow for double the bandwidth, from 8GT/s to 16GT/s but there are a bunch of other changes we should be more excited over. As it stands, PCIe 3.0 is capable of delivering 75W of power through the connector, with most graphics cards requiring additional PCIe power connectors to get up and running. Well, PCIe 4.0 will be the end of that.

PCIe 4.0 will provide a minimum of 300W, and possibly up to 500W, which is more than enough power for any graphics card on the market. Imagine a world with a new NVIDIA GeForce Titan X graphics card, or a new Radeon RX 480 without the need of PCIe power connectors. It would be a mess-free, clean-looking gaming PC - something that is simply impossible today because there's no way around delivering power to graphics cards without the PCIe power connectors.

HBM3 is being worked on by SK Hynix and Samsung and will offer up to 64GB VRAM at higher speeds than HBM2, but a low-cost version of HBM is also in the works, which will feature less bandwidth but a lower cost point than HBM1 and HBM2.

The new low-cost HBM will feature increased pin speeds, from the 2Gbps on HBM2 to around 3Gbps on the new low-cost HBM while the memory bandwidth shifts from 256GB/sec per DRAM stack, to around 200GB/sec per stack. This means the upcoming low-cost HBM could reach the mass market, so we could be looking at HBM-powered notebooks and consumer graphics cards, more so than just the three from AMD that we have now in the Radeon R9 Fury X, Radeon R9 Fury and R9 Nano graphics cards.

When the first wave of HBM arrived, we were blown away by its bandwidth (512GB/sec) but it was the form factor that really made me take a step back, allowing for super-fast graphics cards like the Radeon R9 Nano from AMD. Well, HBM2 is already here and used by NVIDIA on their Pascal-based Tesla P100 graphics card, but not in the consumer space... yet.

SK Hynix and Samsung are working on new HBM technologies, with HBM3 sitting at the top of the hill. HBM3 will offer twice the bandwidth, but it will feature a lower cost. Right now, HBM3 is known in multiple forms - SK Hynix refers to it as HBM3 or HBMx, while Samsung calls it xHBM or Extreme HBM. Either way, the next generation HBM technology is an improvement over both of its predecessors in HBM1 and HBM2.

HBM2 offers 256GB/sec of bandwidth per layer of DRAM (1024GB/sec total), while HBM3 doubles that to 512GB/sec (2GB/sec+) of memory bandwidth. Better yet, HBM3 should usher in higher-end graphics cards with 64GB of HBM3, which will just be incredible. I don't think we'll see HBM3 on consumer graphics cards anytime soon, but the low-cost HBM technology that is on the way will instead be used - that or GDDR5 and GDDR5X which still offer great performance.

MSI has just announced its new GeForce GTX 1060 3G range of graphics cards, which will be mostly the same as the normal GTX 1060 except it has 3GB of VRAM instead of 6GB of VRAM.

There will be five different models of the GTX 1060 3GB from MSI, with the GeForce GTX 1060 GAMING X 3G, GTX 160 GAMING 3G, GTX 1060 ARMOR 3G OCV1, GTX 1060 ARMOR 3GV1, and GTX 1060 3GT OC graphics cards. There are varying clock speeds, with the GTX 1060 GAMING X 3G featuring its GP106 GPU clocked at 1594/1809MHz for base/boost, respectively. The GAMING X cards will feature MSI's infamous TWIN FROZR VI cooling technology, while the ARMOR models will feature the ARMOR 2X cooling tech.

As for pricing, we should see MSI's GeForce GTX 1060 GAMING 3G priced at around $215, while the GAMING X will be a little more expensive, and the ARMOR models a little cheaper.

NVIDIA has released its 372.54 GeForce driver, and with it comes cool feature additions and key optimizations for new and upcoming games as well as GTX-10 Series laptops.

Games helped this time are No Man's Sky (which now supports SLI, and possibly gets some general performance love), Deus Ex: Mankind Divided (general optimizations and SLI support), Obduction (which features NVIDIA VRWorks' Multi-Res Shading for better framerates), F1 2016, and Paragon (beta).

As for the laptops, you get improvements to BatteryBoost and a DPC fix for single-GPU systems.

Intel's current Extreme Rig Challenge is still going, with the biggest custom PC makers in the US competing to make the most extreme gaming PC around Intel's new Core i7-6950X processor and Intel SSD 750 Series drive. All you have to do is tweet towards whoever you think has the best PC, but now you can win a graphics card for just voting for one of the PCs.

AVADirect is sitting in fourth position under NXIC PC, Origin PC and Digital Storm - and are now giving away a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 graphics card in order to say thanks for the support during the Intel Extreme Rig Challenge. AVADirect is letting you enter the competition to win the GeForce GTX 1060 daily, so you can vote 20 more times before it ends.

Which gaming PC will you be voting for? If you want to win the GeForce GTX 1060, just visit AVADirect's website and vote!

AMD has now finished the launch of its entire desktop GPU stack of its Polaris-based graphics cards, with the new Radeon RX 480, RX 470 and RX 460 now released and in gamers' hands. The next thing for AMD is the next-gen Vega architecture, but before that - we'll see another release from AMD with the Polaris architecture.

Chris Hook, the Senior Director, Global Marketing and PR for Radeon Technologies Group has teased on his personal Facebook wall that the above image is from the "Vega launch venue", adding "Shh, don't tell the press...". AMD first teased the next-gen Vega architecture during the Capsaicin event at the Game Developers Conference earlier this year, and then again when RTG boss Raja Koduri celebrated a Vega development milestone in June.

Now, how close are we to the reveal of Vega? Well, I think we're a little further off than you might think. In the next couple of months, AMD will follow the release of its Radeon RX 480 with a faster version, and I don't think it'll be the Radeon RX 490 - but maybe the Radeon RX 480X. An improved graphics card after the power draw issues that plagued its launch, with a revamped PCB and cooler, alongside a more finely tuned Polaris 10 GPU. But Vega? AMD has said that Vega will use HBM2, and I can't see AMD diving into HBM2 head first anytime this year as their GPU roadmap has Vega coming in early 2017.

NVIDIA flew a bunch of tech press and YouTubers out to London for the announcement of its Pascal-based GeForce graphics cards making their way into gaming notebooks. During the event, NVIDIA announced that the GeForce GTX 1080, GTX 1070 and GTX 1060 would be finding their way into various gaming notebooks in all different shapes and sizes.

First, the specs: the top of the line GeForce GTX 1080 will feature 2560 CUDA cores and a 1733MHz boost clock with 8GB of GDDR5X at 10GHz. This is the identical CUDA core count and VRAM on the desktop GTX 1080, while the GPU boost speeds are down from the ~2GHz or so on the desktop GTX 1080.

NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 1070 has been slightly bumped up from its desktop counterpart, with 2048 CUDA cores, 1645MHz boost clock, and the same 8GB of GDDR5 at 8GHz that is found on the desktop part. The mid-range GTX 1060 has the same specs as its desktop version, with 1280 CUDA cores and 1670MHz boost, with 6GB of GDDR5 at 8GHz.