Graphics Cards - Page 218

NVIDIA has been absolutely dominating the high-end graphics card market for a while now, and even more so with the release of the Pascal architecture and the GeForce GTX 1080, GTX 1070 - and then the monster that is the new Titan X.

Well, according to the latest rumors from Baidu user USH Ishimura, NVIDIA's next generation Volta architecture is going to be an absolute powerhouse. The user said that the successor to the GP104 (which is the GPU that powers the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070) will offer "really strong" performance.

The rumor continues, adding that there will be three high-end gaming graphics cards unveiled with the next-gen Volta architecture. Right now under the Pascal architecture, we have the GP102 which powers the Titan X, GP104 which powers the GeForce GTX 1080 and GTX 1070, while the GP106 powers the mid-range GTX 1060.

NVIDIA's new GeForce GTX 10 series graphics cards are made on the 16nm FinFET process, with NVIDIA contracting long term partner TSMC to manufacture the Pascal-based GPUs.

According to South Korean newspaper Chosun Biz, Samsung has secured a contract manufacturing order to make NVIDIA's next-gen GPUs. Chosun Biz said that Samsung will make the next-gen GPUs using its 14nm process before the end of the year, based on the Pascal architecture.

This is interesting news for a few different reasons; firstly, NVIDIA shifting to the 14nm node is an interesting move since it seems to have nailed the 16nm node with its GeForce GTX 1080, GTX 1070 and GTX 1060 graphics cards. Secondly, does this mean Volta has been delayed and we're going to see a 14nm-based Pascal refresh in early/mid-2017?

NIVDIA is on the eve of launching its mobile GeForce GTX 10 series graphics cards, with VideoCardz providing some new details on what the mobile versions of Pascal will deliver.

According to the site, Clevo is already teasing its GeForce GTX 1080 and GeForce GTX 1070 powered gaming notebooks, which can be configured up to the desktop Core i7-6700K processor. Clevo's new P870DM3-G gaming laptop will arrive with a 17.3-inch display that can be optioned as a 1080p or 4K panel, both with NVIDIA G-Sync technology. There will be support for up to 64GB RAM, but we're all here to know how fast the mobile GeForce GTX 1080 and GeForce GTX 1070 is, right?

We know that the mobile GeForce GTX 1070 will feature more CUDA cores than its desktop counterpart, as they would be trying to reach the same performance in a notebook, as we have on a desktop. This would be an interesting move, as it means NVIDIA is not cutting down the GTX 1070, but beefing it up in CUDA cores. As for the VRAM, we're expecting the full 8GB of GDDR5 clocked at 8GHz, with a 256-bit memory bus and 256GB/sec memory bandwidth - not too damn bad for a gaming notebook, huh?

NVIDIA is preparing some pretty delicious mobile GeForce GTX 1070 graphics card, and according to the latest rumors it could offer similar performance to the desktop GeForce GTX 1070, and nearly as fast as the desktop GeForce GTX 980 Ti.

This means the upcoming mobile GTX 1070 would be faster than the current GTX 980 that's for notebooks, but to be nearly as fast as the desktop GTX 980 Ti, which is considerably faster than the GTX 980? Impressive stuff. The report has the GPU clock on the mobile GeForce GTX 1070 reaching 1822MHz, while the typical boost sits at 1645MHz.

We should hear more information on the mobile GeForce GTX 10 series soon, but if this rumor turns out to be true, we could be in for some seriously fast gaming notebooks that could also be thinner and more power efficient.

AMD has officially launched its new Radeon RX 470, the second graphics card powered by the new Polaris architecture and made on the 14nm FinFET process. AMD's new Radeon RX 470 starts at $179 and is capable of 1080p 60FPS gaming on a 120W TDP. I have received a few Radeon RX 470 models, with the SAPPHIRE Nitro RX 470 4GB review going up very soon - but I thought I'd brief you on what to expect from the new $179 graphics card from AMD.

Inside, we have 2048 stream processors with up to 4.9 TFLOPs of performance and 32 compute units, this is joined by 4GB or 8GB of GDDR5 RAM at up to 7Gbps on a 256-bit memory bus, providing 211GB/sec memory bandwidth.

The Polaris architecture is about as future-proof as you can get, including DisplayPort 1.4 which supports up to 8K 30Hz displays as well as 4K 120Hz which isn't far away. HDMI 2.0 is finally here, after the Fiji architecture being let down without 4K 60FPS support through HDMI 1.4 at the time. We also have HDR display, which will allow High Dynamic Range monitors to provide Polaris-based graphics cards like the Radeon RX 470 with an experience that really is like no other. The Radeon RX 470 has FreeSync support, with over 80 monitors powered by FreeSync now on the market.

My review of NVIDIA's new Titan X graphics card will be up in the next couple of hours, and it's completely glowing - due to the fact that the Pascal-based $1200 graphics card has amazing performance.

But, I like the push the boundaries of everything that I test, so I set up my triple 4K monitor rig and cranked the resolution up to 11,520 x 2160 and tested out the new Titan X to see if it would have the same ~20% or so performance benefit over the GP104-based GeForce GTX 1080. Well, I was wrong - it's faster than that, with a huge 51.4% lead in Heaven so far.

I'm currently testing a few other games at 11,520 x 2160 and will write a full article up once it's done - but for now, a 51.4% increase in Heaven at this mammoth resolution is making me weak at the knees.

NVIDIA's new Titan X was launched in the last few hours, and while it's priced at a wallet-busting $1200 - it has already sold out on NVIDIA's website.

NVIDIA's GeForce.com website is the only place in the world where you can buy the Titan X graphics card on its own, and I've just checked the site to get some detailed specifications for my own review (which is coming as fast as my fingers can type) - and it is listed as "Out of stock".

The new Titan X is a monster of a graphics card, with 12GB of GDDR5X (up from the 8GB on the GTX 1080) and a nice bump in performance over the impressive GTX 1080. We'll have some content on it flowing in the next few days, but considering they're already sold out - I'm blown away with the response so far.

AMD has released its new Radeon Software Crimson Edition 16.7.3 drivers, which include the usual bug fixes and performance improvements. You can download them right here.

Rise of the Tomb Raider enjoys another 10% performance on the Radeon RX 480 graphics card, thanks to the new RSCE 16.7.3 drivers. But there's also a bunch of bug fixes for popular games like Overwatch, Hitman, Total War: Warhammer, Dirt Rally, DOOM, and more. More games than ever have been fixed or improved with the RSCE 16.7.3 drivers.

If you want to check out all of the fixed and known issues with the new RSCE 16.7.3 drivers, check out AMD's support page.

NVIDIA is reportedly preparing for the launch of its mobile GeForce GTX 10 GPUs for later this month, with NVIDIA allowing its notebook partners to unveil Pascal-powered gaming notebooks between August 17-21, when Gamescom 2016 takes place.

In terms of specifications, we don't know what to expect with the mobile GeForce GTX 1080, but we should expect it to be nearly identical to its desktop counterpart. Last year, NVIDIA unleashed the desktop GTX 980 for notebooks, providing desktop GTX 980 performance inside of a gaming notebook, and it was beyond impressive.

DigitTimes is behind the report, saying that ASUS, MSI, GIGABYTE and Clevo will have their new gaming notebooks on show with NVIDIA's new Pascal-based GeForce GPUs inside. DigiTimes adds that NVIDIA will remove the 'M' from the mobile GPUs in order to provide a streamlined path to GeForce graphics cards on both the desktop, and mobile side of things.

The release of NVIDIA's next-gen Titan X is right around the corner, with some leaked 3DMark results to whet our appetite before it launches on August 2. There aren't many samples being sent to reviewers, where I personally do not have a card - but I will be trying!

Now we're within a day of the launch, leaked 3DMark results are here to tease the performance of the Pascal-based Titan X graphics card. VideoCardz got its hands-on some 3DMark results, running the Fire Strike Performance and Fire Strike Ultra runs of 3DMark with some bloody impressive results.

The new Titan X scores 26,660 in 1080p run of Fire Strike versus the 21,603 from the GeForce GTX 1080 - an increase of 23%. In the 4K run of Fire Strike, the new Pascal-based Titan X beats the GeForce GTX 1080 by 29% - with the Titan X scoring 6532 against the GTX 1080 with 5043.

While NVIDIA hasn't sent us the new Pascal-based Titan X, there are some reviewers who have received their GP102-powered graphics card and are throwing it into synthetic testing to see how fast it really is.

The synthetic benchmark side of Titan X that was used was CuDNN, offering a huge 200% increase over the previous GeForce GTX Titan X (note, the new Titan X is just that 'Titan X' with the GeForce GTX branding dropped from the name). The new Titan X is using a new implementation of CuDNN, so the speedup is from both the software, and the improved hardware on Titan X.

Specifications wise, the new Titan X has 16% more CUDA cores and 42% higher GPU clocks - so in raw horsepower, we have a decent amount of hardware improvements. According to the benchmarks, we can expect the new Titan X to be 74% to 91% faster in Alexnet, 76% to 200% on OverFear, 74% to 84% on Inception and 91% to 98% in VGG.

When AMD launched the Radeon RX 480 earlier this month, we saw the company focus on the $100-$300 market. Starting with a bang, AMD's first Polaris-based graphics card started at just $199 and now the cheaper, but still VR-ready graphics cards are here.

The new Radeon RX 470 and RX 460 have been detailed by the company, and will be released on August 4 and August 2, respectively. The Radeon RX 470 is a small graphics card, packing the Polaris architecture and promising to deliver 60FPS+ with AA enabled in nearly all of the best-looking games on the market at 1080p.

AMD's new Radeon RX 470 packs up to 4.9TFLOPS of performance with the GPU clocks at 926/1206MHz base and boost clocks, respectively. There's 4GB of GDDR5 RAM clocked at 6.6GHz on a 256-bit memory bus that is capable of 211GB/sec, and it all comes within a 120W TDP. This card is going to be immensely popular with gamers where NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 1060 which starts at $249, and with gamers who don't want to spend over $199 but want 1080p 60FPS performance.

It was over 18 months ago now that NVIDIA found itself in quite the predicament, with its GeForce GTX 970 advertised with 4GB of VRAM, but only had access to 3.5GB of it at high speeds, while the remaining 512MB was performance-limited.

NVIDIA agreed to settle 15 class-action lawsuits for undisclosed terms, but now the company has confirmed it will be paying each person who has a GeForce GTX 970, giving them $30 and covering $1.3 million in legal fees.

Right now this is only a preliminary settlement, so a court will still need to approve the terms before consumers can start claiming their $30. NVIDIA has said it will not be capping the total amount it will pay to consumers, which is actually surprising. Good guy NVIDIA, after all of the crap that happened 18 months ago.

Siggraph 2016 - Walking through Siggraph 2016, there's something that caught my eye in a big way - Otoy had a 16K display on show, using 16 x 4K TVs, powered by AMD's new Radeon Pro graphics cards.

16K is pretty crazy, so let's clarify what we're talking about here:

It's virtually impossible to put into words what 16K looks like, but if you have seen a 4K TV or display before, 3840 x 2160 is made up of four times the pixels of a 1080p display. 16K, is made up of 16 of those 4K displays, which is made up of 32 x 1080p resolution. So, we're talking some mammoth numbers here.

Siggraph 2016 - AMD has announced its new Radeon Pro SSG graphics card, with it being one of the first under the new Radeon Pro branding, with AMD rebranding its FirePro graphics card range.

AMD's new Radeon Pro SSG is a super unique new way of professional graphics, as it has flash memory attached to the graphics card, which can see professional graphics solutions scale far beyond the 32GB limit we're at now. Instead of having a 32GB frame buffer, which might sound like a lot to gamers, it gets used very quickly with massive professional workloads.

Radeon Pro SSG uses flash memory that can scale into the terabytes, which means we'll see professional graphics cards with 1TB or 2TB of memory available. The flash memory has direct communication with the GPU but doesn't work in the way of High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) which is physically on the Interposer, with the GPU. Performance wise, the flash memory on Radeon Pro SSG can handle 8K video at 96FPS compared to the previous high-end FirePro graphics card that was only capable of 8K at 17FPS - a huge 5.6x increase in performance.

Siggraph 2016 - AMD has changed its entire professional graphics branding at Siggraph 2016, with Radeon Pro replacing the FirePro branding, bringing all of AMD's graphics cards under the Radeon umbrella under Radeon Technologies Group.

AMD has three new Radeon Pro WX professional graphics cards, with all of them powered by their new Polaris architecture. We have the Radeon Pro WX 4100, WX 5100 and the higher-end WX 7100 with AMD telling us that they will all be priced at under $1000, with the WX4100 and WX5100 being priced "well below" $1000. What does WX stand for? Workstation experience, which makes sense, and makes things easier to discern between Radeon RX (consumer graphics) and Radeon Pro WX (workstation graphics).

The traditional workstation industry is who AMD are targeting with the Radeon Pro WX series graphics cards, as the WX series will have companies like Dell or HP that will have specific requirements in the way of power use, or clock speeds so that their workstations will last for years and years.

SAPPHIRE has just officially unveiled its new NITRO+ Radeon RX 480, which is positioned perfectly for 1080p and 1440p gaming.

The new NITRO+ Radeon RX 480 has the same 2304 stream processors as the AMD Radeon RX 480 reference card, with the Polaris 10 GPU overclocked to 1342MHz on boost. It has 8GB of GDDR5 clocked at 8GHz on a 256-bit memory bus, while the 4GB model has a boost clock of 1306MHz and has its 4GB of GDDR5 clocked at 1750MHz.

SAPPHIRE includes the usual VR support thanks to AMD, with two HDMI ports which makes it much easier to get your VR headset connected into the graphics card. Normally most graphics cards only have a single HDMI port, so if you have a monitor or TV connected, you need to disconnect it in order to get your VR headset connected.

NVIDIA has just unleashed its new Quadro P6000 and P5000 graphics cards, both based on the new Pascal architecture and on the 16nm FinFET process.

Starting with the higher-end Quadro P6000, we have a P100 GPU with the full 3840 CUDA cores and a huge 24GB of GDDR5X RAM. It will have 4 x DisplayPort 1.4 connectors and DVI, with NVIDIA saying the Quadro P6000 can support four 5K 60Hz displays.

The Quadro P5000 has the GP104 GPU (the same one found in the GeForce GTX 1080 and GTX 1070) while it has 2560 CUDA cores. There's 16GB of DDR5X RAM, four DisplayPort and DVI outputs. Where Quadro cards differ from the GeForce side of things, is that the new Quadro graphics cards support 4K 120/240Hz and even 8K video at 30Hz.

NVIDIA might have just launched its next-gen Titan X graphics card, but thinking into 2017 - what will NVIDIA do since it has so many high-end, enthusiast graphics cards out on its Pascal architecture? Volta, baby.

According to the latest rumors, NVIDIA will launch its Volta architecture in May 2017 at its own GPU Technology Conference that is being held May 8-11. NVIDIA's current roadmap has Volta ready for 2018, but the new rumors suggest NVIDIA is preparing Volta for a big unveil in the second half of 2017 - over six months ahead of schedule.

Volta was meant to arrive on the 10nm process, but according to Fudzilla, it will use the 16nm FinFET process - the same node that the new GeForce GTX 1080, GeForce GTX 1070 and GeForce GTX 1060 are all on. Volta will use stacked DRAM, so we should expect it to be quite the monster when it comes to performance. Fudzilla adds that the performance per watt is "expected to increase tremendously", which is exciting to hear.

With the release of the Radeon RX 480, we have seen a newly-focused AMD that isn't trying to compete in a market that it can't compete in yet against NVIDIA. The mainstream market is where the money and consumers are, and this market is thriving.

Well, now we have leaks on SAPPHIRE's upcoming Radeon RX 470 and RX 460 graphics cards, led by the SAPPHIRE Radeon RX 470 Platinum Edition. Sapphire's take on it looks like AMD's reference card, and that's not a bad thing - but the price will be what gamers will jump at - with a rumored price of just $179 USD.

SAPPHIRE's Radeon RX 470 Platinum Edition PCB features a 4+1-phase design, whereas the Radeon RX 480 had a 6+1-phase design. One single 6-pin power connector is required, keeping PSU requirements nice and low.