Graphics Cards - Page 220

AMD has the mid-range market tied up with its Radeon RX 480, which we reviewed right here - and then again with Radeon RX 480s in CrossFire which destroyed the GeForce GTX 1080 - but what about the high-end, enthusiast market?

Now we have news from our friends over at Fudzilla, who are reporting that we'll see AMD's first HBM2-based product in early 2017, rocking the next-gen Vega architecture. There will not be any HBM2-based GPUs released this year, as HBM2 yields are not high enough to hit consumer video cards. Right now, NVIDIA has all of the HBM2 to itself, using it on its high-end Tesla P100 video card.

What memory standard will the Vega 10 card use? We suspect it'll use GDDR5X, which scales up to 10GHz, and was recently used on the GeForce GTX 1080 from NVIDIA. The Vega architecture should deliver some large improvements over the Polaris architecture, and I'm sure it's going to be a monster that will battle NVIDIA in the high-end arena with its purported Titan X successor which is reportedly going to drop next month.

AMD has released an update regarding the impending release of their new Radeon Software 16.7.1 drivers, which will fix the Radeon RX 480 from drawing excess current from the PCIe bus. If you haven't seen it, we just posted up an article on the Radeon RX 480s in CrossFire beating out the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080.

The company posted on their AMD Gaming Facebook page that they are "confident that the levels of reported power draws by the Radeon RX 480 do not pose a risk of damage to motherboards or other PC components based on expected usage, we are serious about addressing this topic and allaying outstanding concerns. Towards that end, we assembled a worldwide team this past weekend to investigate and develop a driver update to improve the power draw. We're pleased to report that this driver-Radeon Software 16.7.1-is now undergoing final testing and will be released to the public in the next 48 hours".

AMD's upcoming Radeon Sofware 16.7.1 drivers include a tweak that will handle the power distribution on the Radeon RX 480, which will decrease the current drawn from the PCIe bus. Not only that, but AMD has included an option to reduce the total power drawn from the Radeon RX 480, with a "minimum performance impact". This new option will be found in the "compatibility" UI toggle in the Global Settings menu of Radeon Settings.

Microsoft is in quite the position with Windows 10, but it hasn't fully realized what it can do with DX12... yet.

The company has just announced it will be offering game developers a new abstraction layer that will allow developers to have better multi-GPU support in DX12 games. This new layer will also allow game developers to add multi-GPU support into their games with minimal additional code required.

Developers will still have to work much harder to add Explicit Multi Adapter, which is Microsoft's way of allowing multi-GPU setups to work under DX12 from NVIDIA and AMD... combined. That way, you can use something like a GeForce GTX 980 alongside a new Radeon RX 480, with both of the GPUs working together under Explicit Multi Adapter and DX12.

The leaks continue on NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 1060, which is reportedly set for an official announcement for July 7. The latest leak is from a 3DMark performance result, which gives us a taste of what to expect from NVIDIA's upcoming GP106-based mid-range video card. NVIDIA will want to hit AMD where it hurts, which is with their new Radeon RX 480.

NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 1060 will reportedly feature 1280 CUDA cores, 80 TMUs, and 6GB of GDDR5 RAM at 8GHz on a 192-bit memory bus. As for the nitty gritty, it'll feature the GP106 GPU which is a different ASIC than the GP104 used on the GeForce GTX 1080 and GeForce GTX 1070 - and for clock speeds, we're set to see 1506MHz on the Base clock, while we have 1708MHz on Boost.

Now what about that 3DMark performance? XFastest has leaked out some results of the GTX 1060, with it scoring 3014 in 3DMark FireStrike Ultra (the 4K run of the benchmark) which is higher than the 2712 that the AMD Radeon RX 480 scored in our benchmarks of the card. 1080p performance is just as good, beating out the AMD Radeon RX 480 once again - with 11,225 on the GTX 1060, while the Radeon RX 480 manages 10,600.

There are new reports out that AMD's new Radeon RX 480 4GB cards can be upgraded to 8GB through a BIOS upgrade, meaning that AMD is shipping each and every RX 480 with 8GB of RAM, and then using a BIOS to downgrade/hide the additional 4GB of framebuffer.

Right now it's only confirmed on the early retail cards, so this might change in the coming weeks - so do not buy an RX 480 with 4GB of RAM absolutely, 100% hoping it has 8GB of RAM as this will change. Right now, WCCFTech purchased a retail Radeon RX 480 4GB model and flashed it with the vBIOS for the 8GB model, and 8GB of RAM appeared - a nice, free upgrade, eh?

Considering the 4GB model costs just $199 and the 8GB model costs $239, this is quite the savings - and makes the RX 480 an even better purchase at this price. As it stands, AMD is looking at losing $40 per RX 480 sold if it's using a vBIOS to downgrade the RAM to 4GB in order to meet the demand from consumers.

NVIDIA has been on a roll lately with its new Pascal architecture, with the huge releases of the new GeForce GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 cards, while the rumors of an imminent launch of the mid-range GTX 1060 could be around the corner.

How does it get better? Well, news is now arriving on the next-gen Pascal-based Titan X successor. VR World is reporting that they've had hands-on time with the GP102-based GeForce GTX Titan card, with a few details on NVIDIA's new monster.

NVIDIA's next-gen Titan X successor will feature both 8+8 and 8+6-pin PCIe power connectors, with the PCIe power connectors being found at the front of the card, and not on top. The 8+8-pin power connectors will provide up to 375W TDP, while the 8+6-pin version will provide 300W. Performance-wise, it should be a monster with around 50% more horsepower over the already lightning quick GTX 1080.

If you haven't heard about the power consumption issues on the Radeon RX 480, you might want to read our article on it here. To bring you up to speed quickly, some reputable sites like PC Perspective and Tom's Hardware have discovered that AMD's new Polaris-based Radeon RX 480 is consuming too much power over the PCIe slot, above and beyond the specification of 75W.

Well, AMD has come out defending the Radeon RX 480, saying: "As you know, we continuously tune our GPUs in order to maximise their performance within their given power envelopes and the speed of the memory interface, which in this case is an unprecedented 8Gbps for GDDR5. Recently, we identified select scenarios where the tuning of some RX 480 boards was not optimal. Fortunately, we can adjust the GPU's tuning via software in order to resolve this issue. We are already testing a driver that implements a fix, and we will provide an update to the community on our progress on Tuesday (July 5, 2016)".

We had this update in our original story, but I felt it needed it's own headline and special attention. Remember that it's the 4th of July weekend in the US right now, but there's a fix on the way. I dare say that the custom RX 480s won't have this problem, so by the time you get your hands-on the RX 480, the issues should be fixed.

NVIDIA's GeForce cards are a dominant force on the latest Steam hardware survey, with 56.7% of gamers using a GeForce GPU of some kind. AMD has lost a little of its steam in the last 12 months, with 25% of gamers using Radeon.

You can see that in January 2015 that AMD had 28.9% of users, but has declined over the last 18 months down to 25%. I'm sure the numbers will increase for AMD, now that it's next-gen Radeon RX 480 is here. In that same amount of time, NVIDIA went from 51.6% to its new lead of 56.7% - all of those users buying GeForce 900 series cards, like the GTX 950 through to the GTX 980 Ti.

It was only a couple of weeks ago that we reported on the leaked photos of the SAPPHIRE Radeon RX 480 Nitro, but now we have some high-res shots of the RX 480 Nitro that look positively gorgeous. Our review on the reference AMD Radeon RX 480 is right here.

In the new photos we can see the beautiful detail that SAPPHIRE has used on the RX 480 Nitro, with a black and silver backplate - but also a button that reportedly switches the LED illumination from temperature to GPU load mode indicators. You should be able to turn it off completely, too.

SAPPHIRE's new Radeon RX 480 Nitro will have its Polaris 10 GPU running at between 1325 and 1350MHz, while it also rocks removable fans. Why would you want removable fans? Well, for cleaning - it makes total sense. Secondly, if one of the fans becomes faulty over your years with it, you can easily replace it instead of replacing the entire card.

The DX12 patch for Total War: WARHAMMER has been released, with Alien: Isolation developer Creative Assembly stating that the DX12 renderer is still in a beta stage.

Right now, there's no benefits for NVIDIA GeForce owners in DX12, as GeForce cards perform worse under the DX12 renderer. DSOGaming did some testing using the Extreme scenario, and the in-game benchmarking tool on their Intel Core i7-4930K, GeForce GTX 980 Ti system.

The GTX 980 Ti on DX11 in WARHAMMER forms at 96FPS while in DX12 we have 27% less performance, with just 70FPS average. We will be doing our own testing in Total War: WARHAMMER in the near future, testing out my entire suite of video cards.

AMD did wonders with its Radeon R9 Nano, a bite-sized video card that is mighty powerful, in a small package thanks to its HBM1 technology.

Well, now GIGABYTE has announced its new GeForce GTX 1070 Mini-ITX OC, which is a smaller version of the GTX 1070. The card has a factory overclock on its GPU, with 1531/1721MHz on the Gaming Mode and 1556/1746 in OC Mode. If you want the higher clock speeds offered by OC Mode, you'll need to download GIGABYTE's overclocking software to reach it.

GIGABYTE's GeForce GTX 1070 Mini-ITX OC features a custom PCB with 5+1-phase power delivery, 8GB of GDDR5 RAM, a 90mm cooler with a 3D active fan, one click Super Overclocking, and measures in at just 17cm (or 6.7 inches). An incredibly small, and incredibly fast video card. Be careful with its display output, as GIGABYTE has provided 1 x DP, 1 x HDMI and 2 x DVI ports - compared to the 3 x DP, 1 x HDMI and 1 x DVI on most GTX 1070 and GTX 1080 cards.

It has barely been 48 hours with AMD's new Radeon RX 480 on the market, and we're already hearing rumors that NVIDIA will launch its new GeForce GTX 1060... next week.

Reports are surfacing that the company will launch the GP106-based GeForce GTX 1060 with a 120W TDP, 1280 CUDA cores on 10 SMs, with 80 TMUs and 48 ROPs. There'll reportedly be 3GB and 6GB models on a 192-bit memory interface rocking GDDR5.

NVIDIA already has two 16nm FinFET-based cards on the market in the form of the GeForce GTX 1080 and GeForce GTX 1070, but it will be hurting in the coming weeks in the mid-range market with AMD chewing up the $199-$239 market with its next-gen Radeon RX 480 video card. NVIDIA will need to maintain its market dominance in the mid-range, but it needs a new card to hit that market - so enter the GTX 1060.

AMD changed things up with its new Radeon RX series, moving away from the Radeon R7/R9 naming system - towards something that will hopefully stick this time. The new Radeon 400 series is split into two subseries; the RX 400 and 400.

The Radeon RX parts will offer 1.5 TFLOPs or more of performance with at least 100GB/sec memory bandwidth - but for cards that don't have that type of speed, we can expect them to rock the Radeon 400 branding. AMD has also confirmed it will be using XX5 revisions, where we might see faster versions of the cards over time - especially as yields improve, leakage is minimized, or AMD wants to hit NVIDIA again with higher-clocked versions of their cards.

AMD says there are 9 tiers that are split into five groups, where Tier 6 (46X cards) might appear with both the RX 460 and non-RX 460. Tier 9 is the most exciting, where we can see higher than 256-bit memory bus with 4K gaming being the focus point here, which has me thinking - will the Radeon RX 490/495 be a Polaris-based design, or will AMD save this for the Vega architecture?

With the release of the new Radeon RX 480, AMD has released the Radeon Software Crimson Edition 16.6.2 drivers that include support for the new Polaris 10-based video card.

The new drivers also include a new Crossfire profile for World of Tanks, and so much more. Notably, we have support for AMD's new Radeon Wattman - which is the company's new utility within Radeon Software that provides users with more control than ever before over their GPU. One of the big things that I'm happy to see is that there's now a Crossfire toggle, which allows you to enable Crossfire support globally for all games, instead of picking and choosing the games you want Crossfire enabled for.

Here's a full list of what to expect:

AMD just debuted the first commercial for its "Radeon Rebellion" campaign, and just like Chris Hook and Raja Koduri promised during my interview with them, it takes quite a different tone than the standard video card ads we're used to.

Watch that again. Did you see any actual video cards? Any gameplay or screenshots? Any statistics or bullet points or specs? Nope. AMD is doubling down on the concept of change, of introducing premium VR for the other 99%, and bringing mainstream PC gamers affordable eyecandy. That's the promise of the RX 480, and indeed for AMD's entire Polaris lineup.

Stay tuned, gang. We'll have exhaustive coverage of the RX 480 very soon including standard benchmarks, VR impressions, and a full review.

What better way to celebrate AMD's launch of the Radeon RX 480 than give 14 of them away? That's what AMD are doing over at Reddit, with the giveaway kicking off on 6/29 at 11AM Eastern Time. The company will host a Radeon Technologies Group AMA and the giveaway on the /r/PCMasterRace subreddit.

AMD's Technical Marketing boss Robert Hallock will be handling questions, but the post on Reddit says "Zen and Vega are off the table for this one, but pretty much everything else related to AMD's GPU division is fair game". AMD says there are limits of one RX 480 per winner, with the giveaway locked to just a few countries: the US, Canada, Europe, Australia and New Zealand. The AMA is obviously open to all, with the giveaway being the RX 480 8GB variant, versus the 4GB model.

Riding on the news of the Radeon RX 480, we now have some pricing information from TechPowerUp, who are reporting that the Radeon RX 470 will be priced at $149 - $50 cheaper than the RX 480 at $199.

The $149 version of the Radeon RX 470 will feature 4GB of RAM while the 8GB variant will cost $179, with the card featuring 2048 stream processors over 32 CUs, down from the 2304 stream processors on the RX 480. The Radeon RX 470 will have its 4GB or 8GB of RAM clocked at 7Gbps, with a reported 110W TDP, according to VideoCardz.

With AMD pricing the Radeon RX 480 4GB at $199, and this pricing on the Radeon RX 470, things could change in a big way for AMD. At just $149, there are going to be countless gamers that can afford a next-gen card that should be perfect for 1080p 60FPS gaming.

The news broke a few days ago that MSI and ASUS were shipping GeForce GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 cards with a modified BIOS, with higher-than-normal clock speeds on the GPU.

MSI have sent me an email explaining the GeForce GTX 1080 Gaming X 8G and GTX 1070 Gaming X 8G shipping with higher speeds out of the box for the press, versus a few extra MHz slower on the retail cards. MSI has said that the MSI Gaming App isn't used by most reviewers, which is true, so they ship their GeForce GTX 1070 and GTX 1080 cards with 'OC Mode' enabled by default to the press. The retail cards on the other hand, are shipped to consumers with 'Gaming Mode' by default, which is slightly slower than the clocks on the OC Mode.

MSI has responded with links to an updated vBIOS for their GeForce GTX 1080 Gaming X 8G, and their GeForce GTX 1070 Gaming X 8G - so that they'll both spool up to the 'OC Modes' which are 1607MHz Base, and 1797MHz on Boost compared to 1582MHz Base and 1771MHz on Boost with Gaming Mode.

We're only a week away from the launch of the AMD Radeon RX 480, with its release on June 29, and now it's being reported that AMD has plenty of RX 480s on hand and that supply is "strong" on the first Polaris-based card to hit the market. NVIDIA recently dropped the price on its Maxwell-based range, including the GeForce GTX 980 Ti, GTX 980 and even the GTX 970.

NVIDIA has hit a huge snag recently with their GeForce GTX 1070/1080, with global shortages and price hikes on their GP104-based offerings. With NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 1080 is $850+ right now, and even $1999 on eBay at one point for EVGA's GeForce GTX 1080 FTW ACX 3.0 card, AMD could really hit NVIDIA where it hurts if they have a strong supply of their Radeon RX 480, and can keep at the $199 price.

There won't be partner cards at launch, with AMD being the only one selling them on June 29 - AIB partner cards with custom PCBs and coolers will arrive in July. SAPPHIRE, XFX, and many others have cards planned - with samples floating down here to my GPU labs in the coming weeks.

We know that AMD's Radeon RX 480 will be capable of 1.5GHz and more on manual overclocking, but now we have leaked shots from the production line, and shots of the cooler being removed.

The Radeon RX 480 features a single 75mm blower fan that directs air towards the aluminum fin heat sink, with a copper contact heat plate placed on top of the GPU die. This pushes the heat out of the back of the card, with AIB partner cards seeing open air solutions, with dual- and triple-fan cooling solutions.

AMD's reference design of the RX 480 doesn't feature backplate, but some of the AIB cards will use one - such as XFX and SAPPHIRE, both designing their own backplates for their custom RX 480s. XFX uses a backplate that covers the entire length of the rear of the card, while SAPPHIRE's take on the backplate covers just the PCB.