Graphics Cards - Page 220

If there's one thing that AMD has nailed throughout 2015 and 2016, it was pushing its FreeSync technology into 121 monitors on the market - nearly 5x that of its competitor in G-Sync from NVIDIA. But now AMD has stepped up the monitor refresh technology game with the announcement of FreeSync 2.

FreeSync has been great, offering up to 144Hz refresh smoothed out with FreeSync on 2560x1440 monitors - and even 100Hz on the latest 3440x1440 monitors on the market.

There are now 121 monitors with FreeSync technology inside, and AMD has 20 partners working on Radeon FreeSync monitors, while only 8 monitor partners work with NVIDIA.

AMD has released its teaser for their upcoming Vega GPU architecture, something that I saw a few weeks ago during their Tech Summit 2016 event - check it out below.

The new 'After the Uprising" video does an extremely good job of continuing the efforts that AMD put into the Radeon Rebellion marketing triumph from last year, but I take a personal spin on it - I consider the drums stream processor cores, and there's a lot of them in the video.

AMD has also launched a new website for all things Vega, which you can find right here at ve.ga - yeah, another nice touch. There's a countdown on the website right now for 3 days and a few hours from now - which is at the start of CES 2017, so expect some big announcements during that time - and keep clicking back here at TT HQ, my article will be waiting for you.

ZOTAC has been keeping some secrets for an unveiling days before CES 2017, with the new GeForce GTX 1080 Mini graphics card - perfect for those blistering fast SFF gaming PCs you want to build.

It has a fully-enabled GP104 GPU with 8GB of GDDR5X at its full 10Gbps bandwidth, with 1620/1759MHz base and boost clocks, respectively. We have 3 x DP 1.4 connectors, 1 x HDMI 2.0b, and 1 x DVI output.

ZOTAC has made totally-new custom PCB with compatible GDDR5X RAM, but we don't know if ZOTAC went with NVIDIA's 5+1-phase VRM, or altered the VRM design. The GeForce GTX 1080 Mini rocks a single 8-pin PCIe power connector, and two SLI-HB bridges. It will consume up to 180W of power, with ZOTAC using a shortened PCB and custom cooler that rocks 2 x fans to keep everything nice and cool.

I wasn't going to write this article, but then I thought it would make for some good discussion at the very least. AMD and NVIDIA have a very big year ahead of them, and in my opinion it'll be the biggest year ever for the GPU giants, but AMD has a distinct advantage overall.

2015 was a massive year for both companies with AMD kicking off the very end of 2014 with the unveiling of its Polaris architecture, and then NVIDIA hit multiple home runs in May with the announcement of its Pascal-based GeForce GTX 10 series. It wasn't long after that when AMD launched its Radeon RX 400 series with three cards: the Radeon RX 460, RX 470, and RX 480.

All three cards did quite well, with the RX 470 representing some excellent value for money for 1080p 60FPS gamers - and even some 1440p gamers. The Radeon RX 480 was the fastest Polaris-based graphics card in the line up, but it couldn't begin to touch NVIDIA's latest GeForce GTX 1070 and GTX 1080. All of this before the unveiling of the new Titan X, which blows away even the GTX 1080 when stressed in 4K gaming and triple-4K display scenarios.

AMD appears to be ringing in the New Year bell a little early this year, with a tease on the official Twitter account for Radeon, with a simple tweet of "New Year. New architecture", teasing its next-gen Vega GPU architecture.

AMD recently held their Tech Summit 2016 event in Sonoma, California - with our first look at a Vega 10-based graphics card with 8GB of HBM2, capable of driving DOOM at 4K 60FPS+ on its highest graphics settings.

It was only a week ago that a Vega 10 GPU of some sort received RRA certification, but so did a 'Polaris 12' graphics chip, too. Performance wise, we should expect Titan X level performance from a Vega 10 graphics card with 8GB of HBM2, and most likely ready to compete against NVIDIA's unannounced and unconfirmed - but teased GeForce GTX 1080 Ti.

ZOTAC has had a strong GeForce GTX 10 series line up in 2016, but they're about to release something SFF gaming PC lovers have wanted for a while: their new GeForce GTX 1070 Mini graphics card.

ZOTAC's upcoming GTX 1070 Mini sports a shorter PCB, and a dual-fan cooler - with ZOTAC's new GTX 1070 Mini featuring a small 17cm custom PCB and their new Ice Storm cooler and Freeze Tech that features 2 x 8mm copper heat pipes that are connected directly to the GPU, with a heat sink that is cooled down by dual 80mm fans.

NVIDIA's reference clocks of 1518/1708MHz for base/boost, respectively are applied - all through a single 8-pin PCIe power connector. There's 8GB of GDDR5 RAM on-board, clocked at 8GHz, while display connectivity is served through 3 x DP, 1 x HDMI 2.0 and 1 x DVI.

AMD is preparing for a massive GPU push in 2017 with their Vega GPU architecture, with our good friends at Fudzilla reporting that there will be "top to bottom designs based on Vega architecture arriving soon".

AMD will utilize HBM2 technology to power its high-end cards that will compete against the likes of NVIDIA's current flagship GeForce GTX 1080 (and possibly even Titan X), as well as the waiting-in-the-wings GeForce GTX 1080 Ti. But the news that AMD will use GDDR5X and GDDR5 on its Vega graphics cards is interesting, something I've been saying for a while now. We've already seen Vega 10 with 8GB of HBM2 running DOOM at 4K 60FPS+ on Ultra/Nightmare settings, which is awesome.

HBM2 is too expensive to use on all Vega graphics cards, and the yields aren't perfect yet - so the use of GDDR5X with its 10Gbps bandwidth makes sense, while GDDR5 is an obvious choice for the lower- and mid-range cards based on the Vega architecture.

We all know that AMD's next-gen Vega 10 GPU is getting closer and closer to becoming a reality, but now both Vega 10 and the upcoming Polaris 12 chip have received RRA certification.

First off: what's this RRA certification? South Korea's National Radio Research Agency is a regulatory body that approves any silicon-based electronic product before it can be pushed out into the consumer market. AMD's upcoming Vega 10 and Polaris 12 GPUs have received RRA certification, which means they're getting much closer to being physical products and not just pre-production boards like we were teased with during the AMD Tech Summit 2016 running DOOM at 4K 60FPS+ on Ultra settings on Vega 10.

So now the game becomes a question of what graphics cards we'll see from Vega 10 and Polaris 12. First off, let's tackle Polaris 12 - which should arrive as a highly tuned Radeon RX 460 which we've been teased about over the last couple of months. AMD stated there would not be a faster GPU under the Polaris family, so don't expect a Radeon RX 490 which blows the hinges off the doors of performance.

AMD has released their new Radeon Software Crimson ReLive Edition 16.12.2 drivers, taking care of some of those bugs and problems that some Radeon graphics card owners have been complaining about since the ReLive Edition drivers launched.

First off, we have fixes for the flashing and corruption issues found in Battlefield 1 when using Radeon RX 400 series graphics cards in CrossFire, various recording issues, and issues relating to the overlay/toolbar when Frame Rate Target Control is enabled, on the Radeon ReLive Edition drivers. The new driver also takes care of the performance-related issues with Borderless Fullscreen application mode when using FreeSync-enabled monitors.

The new drivers can be downloaded here, with a full list of highlights below:

NVIDIA is wanting to get more people into the PC gaming space, with a tease of something it is calling the PC Gaming Revival Kit - and it includes a graphics card, SSD, PSU, and even a game.

Inside, you'll get an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 3GB graphics card, a 240GB SSD from Corsair, and a 450W semi-modular PSU - as well as a free copy of Gears of War 4. The only thing is, if you purchased all of these products and Gears of War 4 separately, it would be cheaper - NVIDIA is just making it much more convenient to buy the gear in one place, at one time, in a single box.

The upgrade box will cost 399 EUR, which converts to around $415.

GALAX has hit a milestone with its GeForce GTX 1060 HOF GOC used to reach a record breaking 3GHz GPU clock, beating the GTX 1070 and GTX 1080 performance in pixel fill rate - but the company had a surprise for the world at its event.

GALAX teased a single slot GeForce GTX 1070 graphics card, with a slick metallic shroud that has an exposed area on the left of the card that teases its pure copper heat sink. GALAX has equipped the single slot GTX 1070 with a blower-style cooler that pushes the air out of the exhaust vent on the back, with the PCB smaller than the Founders Edition card, and it uses an extended shroud cover.

We can expect dual SLI connectors, 1 x 8-pin PCIe power connector - and display connectivity that consists of 1 x DisplayPort, 1 x HDMI, and 1 x DVI. GALAX is expecting to launch the card in early 2017 with a retail price of around $379.

A few hours ago I wrote about AMD's great success throughout 2016, but it has been both Team Red and Team Green that have exploded this year - with NVIDIA hitting a record high $100.21 per share (at the time of writing).

NVIDIA started the year with its shares at $32.37, but reached $45 or so at the time of the GeForce GTX 1070 and GTX 1080 unveiling in May. But it was on November 10 that NVIDIA stock skyrocketed from $67.77 per share, to $87.97 per share on November 11. Why? NVIDIA released their analyst-beating Q3 2016 results, riding the success of their GTX 10 series graphics cards, dominance in machine learning, AI, deep learning, and more.

And now, NVIDIA stock has reached a record $100.21 per share, with Evercore ISI's CJ Muse expecting NVIDIA shares to reach $120 soon, with machine learning "making more and more use of NVIDIA GPUs". NVIDIA has been pushing into the deep learning market for a couple of years now, unleashing their HBM2-powered Tesla P100 graphics card, powered by the Pascal architecture, during GTC 2016 earlier this year.

When NVIDIA launched the GeForce GTX 1070 and GTX 1080 graphics cards in Texas earlier this year, the company teased that its GP104 GPU could hit 2.1GHz, and that has been true - most samples can run between 1.9GHz and 2.1GHz - but 3GHz? Yes, please.

The GALAX GeForce GTX 1060 HOF GOC was used to hit 3010MHz (3.01GHz) on its Pascal-based GP106 core, with the same card reaching 2.8GHz under LN2 last month, but the 3GHz milestone is a big one. Inside, the GALAX GTX 1060 HOF GOC features 1280 CUDA cores, 6GB of GDDR5 RAM, and a 1620MHz clock that gets boosted to 1847MHz. The 8GB of GDDR5 is clocked at 8GHz, providing 192GB/sec of memory bandwidth.

GALAX provides a TDP of 120W, but includes improved PWM and VRMs that require more power to the card for improved stability and overclocking. But where does it help? At the 3GHz barrier, GPUPI (10M) calculations were just 21.685 seconds, and the overclocked GTX 1060 was able to hit higher texture and pixel fill rates than a GTX 1070, and even beating the pixel fill rate performance of a GTX 1080.

ASUS has announced its new ROG XG Station 2, their next-gen external graphics enclosure that replaces the original XG Station that was launched in 2007.

The new ROG XG Station 2 handles the best of the best GPUs on the market, with 1 x PCIe 3.0 x16 slot, 2 x 8-pin PCIe power connectors - handling up to 500W. Not only that, but it can provide another 100W of power to give your notebook some battery love, with the internal PSU meeting 80 Plus Gold efficiency.

ASUS utilizes the high bandwidth of Thunderbolt 3 for its new ROG XG Station 2, where it can use GbE network connectivity, and a 4-port USB 3.0 hub thanks to the additional bandwidth provided. If the bandwidth of Thunderbolt 3 isn't enough (40Gbps) you can slap on an additional USB 3.0 connection (with another 5Gbps of bandwidth) - with ASUS claiming it will improve performance, but I'm guessing not by that much (less than 10%).

We've been hearing rumbles of the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti for a while now, but it seems we might be closer to the release than we thought - now that NVIDIA is reportedly preparing "Club GeForce".

What is Club GeForce? PCWorld reports that NVIDIA's own GeForce Experience software teases it as: "I think of GFE Rewards as more than giveaways-it's a Club with exclusive benefits for GFE users. Through the Club we can help improve our customer's gaming experience and build a GeForce/GFE community". The benefits? One free indie game once a year, as well as a free skin or in-game item for a AAA game once every quarter. There's also weekly giveaways of full games, beta codes, hardware, and more.

In the post, there is a tease for "980 Ti users get first spot in line for 1080 Ti pre-orders"... which is, well, rather interesting to see. The post itself is from a LinkedIn post by NVIDIA looking for a Senior Marketing Manager - GeForce, Gamer Loyalty & Advocacy.

NVIDIA has announced a new indie VR game bundle for new GeForce GTX 1050 and GTX 1060 customers, or those buying a GTX 1050/1060-powered system or laptop at participating retailers.

Those who grab a new GTX 1050/1060-powered system, notebook or graphics card will get to choose from the following games:

Maize, from Finish Line Games, is a just-released first-person adventure game about what happens when two scientists misinterpret a memo from the U.S. Government and create sentient corn. Explore an abandoned farm and a not-so-abandoned underground research facility as you solve puzzles and uncover the mysteries around Maize, and possibly learn a bit about yourself along the way. With a colorful cast of characters and an absolutely absurd world, Maize offers up a unique experience that keeps the surprises coming.

If there's one thing to be excited for right now, leading into 2017 - it would have to be AMD's next generation GPU architecture: Vega.

AMD flew out select technology press to Sonoma, California for its annual Tech Summit - where we finally got our chance to see Vega 10 running in-person, but it was at the New Horizon event that the public got to see Vega 10 running 4K 60FPS in Star Wars: Battlefront's new Rogue One DLC.

AMD was also powering the gaming PC with its upcoming Ryzen CPU, which was announced a couple of days ago. It's an impressive showing so far, with DOOM being teased at 4K 60FPS+ on Ultra and Nightmare graphics settings during the event, something we wrote about here.

Now that AMD has let the Radeon Instinct cat out of the bag, with the Radeon Instinct MI25 accelerator powered by a Vega GPU, we can begin putting some of the pieces together. We don't know much about Vega 10 itself, but we can look at the servers that will be powered by the MI25 accelerator, and do some math.

We also now know that the Vega 10 with its 8GB of HBM2 is capable of running DOOM at 4K 60FPS+, which is impressive for a pre-production, very early board.

AMD teased the upcoming Inventec K888 server with Radeon Instinct MI25 accelerators (4 of them) capable of 100 TFLOPs of GPU power, meaning a single Vega-based Radeon Instinct MI25 has 25 TFLOPs of performance (MI25 = Machine Intelligence 25 TFLOPs, or at least that's how it seems to me). One big caveat here is that AMD is claiming FP16 performance, so we should expect 12.5 TFLOPs of single precision (FP32) performance.

AMD Tech Summit 2016 - One of the things I've been wanting to tell the world is that I got to see AMD's next-generation graphics card in action at their Tech Summit in Sonoma, California a few days ago - and now, I can.

I was witness to seeing Vega 10 rocking 8GB of next generation HBM2 technology running DOOM at 4K (3840x2160) on Ultra settings, with an average of 70FPS. Impressive stuff, considering that NVIDIA's fastest GeForce GTX 1080 and Titan X are required to hit those performance numbers in DOOM.

I had my hand behind the card, which had its fans cranked up to 100% - and it was pushing out some serious heat - but this is a prototype board that is months from being finished. Still, a major technology turn on for me. We don't know much else about the Vega 10-based graphics card that was inside of the PC, either. There have been leaks all over the place about this, and a few of you have been wondering why I haven't written about it.

AMD has hit the mainstream pretty hard this year with the Polaris-based Radeon RX 400 series, but now the Radeon RX 460 represents even better value for money with a BIOS unlock that unleashes 12.5% performance boost.

Over at the overclocking.guide, author der8auer has unlocked a Radeon RX 460 graphics card from its original 896 stream processors, to 1024 stream processors. The TMUs also get a boost, jumping from 56 to 64 TMUs - providing around 10-12% more performance, a great upgrade considering its free.

ASUS Radeon RX 460 Strix and the SAPPHIRE RX 460 Nitro have both been tested with the BIOS upgrade, and they worked - offering increased performance.